


andromeda chained to the rocks

by arbitrarily



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Canon-Typical Violence, Cousin Incest, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Infidelity, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex Performed as Duty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-05-15 09:29:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 55,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19292971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: The first and the last thing to barter is still her body. Ten years and three marriages in the reign of Sansa Stark, the Queen in the North.





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> I...don't even know. I set out to write something very different than what this fic ultimately became. I wanted to explore the initial reign of Sansa Stark, Queen in the North, and somewhere along the way all of _this_ happened. As a general warning, in addition to the warnings below, nothing in this is very happy. I wouldn't call it "dark," per se, but no one here is having fun lol, and the ships tagged are all shaded in degrees of messy angst, to say the least. Okay, maybe Tormund is having fun. I have tagged pairings and characters that may not appear in this first chapter but will in the next two chapters. The remaining two chapters are written (though need editing) and should be posted, barring any life interruptions, over the next couple weeks.
> 
> As a side-note, it has been years since I read the books so this is rooted solely in the TV canon. That said, since Sansa was essentially left in the North with no known or named characters from the show, I borrowed some of the characters from the books that were not used in the show, like Barbrey Dustin. And the Unnamed Price of Dorne from the finale is Quentyn Martell in this because why the hell not. 
> 
> Please: heed the tags! There is major character death throughout this story, as well as everything else tagged. Non-tagged background/implied pairings include Arya/Gendry and Jon/Daenerys (and Jon/Tormund, if you squint).
> 
> And, finally, a link to the song I kept on repeat while writing this: [Like a Shield](https://clairecronin.bandcamp.com/track/like-a-shield) by Claire Cronin.

 

 

 

Treat me right, I’m still a good man’s daughter  
Let me in if I break, and be quiet if I shatter

"ANDROMEDA," Weyes Blood

 

 

It seems a bit late to be having this conversation.  
I’ve had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.

A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY, Hilary Mantel

 

 

 

 

 

Every household has its haunts. Old Nan used to say that. There was more to it than that; Sansa can all but hear it, see it, in her head. Old Nan’s gnarled hands, still nimble and certain as they worked. Her voice, possessed of that same certainty. Every household has its haunts, as every family has its departed.

Now that Sansa is alone at Winterfell she finds she thinks of Old Nan often. The thoughts are fleeting and uninvited. She is easer to remember than the rest. She can reach for her, if only in her mind, and find her presence easily. Without the bitter ache that accompanies any of the others. Mother. Father. Robb. Rickon. Bran. Arya. Jon.

Sansa’s footfalls echo off the stone tiles as she approaches the Great Hall. Alongside her, Beth keeps pace, speaking high and light and eager. Sansa only half-listens to her—idle gossip she plucked already from her handmaids earlier that morning—and she waves her off. The throne sits empty before the raging fire. 

There was more to what Old Nan used to say. The words course through her like a mummer’s trick. Every household has its haunts, as every household has its departed. It is a great deal harder to mourn those who passed through the gate than those interred beneath the ground. 

It is hardest to mourn, she said, when you know this simple truth: There are no endings, only beginnings. 

Sansa Stark, First of Her Name, Protector of the North and the First Men, the Queen in the North, takes her rightful seat.

 

 

 

 

Arya is gone and Jon is gone. It has been years. The winter is long, as both promised and threatened by the Citadel. The bitter cold has crept on the two years since her coronation with no end in sight. Their stores run low and dissatisfaction grows in the North. If only they could feed off of it. 

Sansa inherited a devastated North. So many and so much were devoted to first battling the dead and then in King’s Landing. Her foresight at the time has left her with very little beyond regret. Their supplies are short as is the population of men to remake the North’s forces. As is their patience.

Ruling, Sansa has learned, is very much so a numbers game and there is never enough. 

She went down to King’s Landing months after the devastation Daenerys brought. Little progress had been made to clear the wreckage, save for the Red Keep. She was told that was what Grey Worm, Daenerys’s Unsullied General, had wanted. “Let them remember,” she was told he said. She could understand the impulse. Yes, let them remember. Arya would not tell her what she had seen, what she remembered of the onslaught. That was fine as well. Sansa’s concern then had been twofold: it was the North, and it was Jon. They would not let her see him, but she fought for it. Demanded it. Each time she was denied and each time she felt that anger in her swell larger. She buried it deeper, but she kept it.

After, after everything, Bran’s council moved forward with great speed. The recent past became just that—the past. It still marred every part of the North Sansa knew and it still lived inside of her, red and pulsing and vital, private, like any other organ. 

Over the first two years of her reign, Sansa made a name for herself—the fair but vicious Queen in the North. They say that ice runs through her veins. That she will not flinch, she will not bend, she will not tolerate less than she deems worthy. They say that she was built harsh by the very climate they all live in and with each passing day she grows colder. Sansa accepts this assessment of her; it is better than finding weakness. With coldness comes control. If they think her too harsh, if they call her cruel, she can accept that so long as they still call her Queen. 

But she is angry. Her rage burns hot beneath her skin. She does not think she will ever stop.

Over the years of war, both against the living and the dead, a great many houses were decimated. The Karstarks and the Umbers are gone. A darker side of Sansa still feels a quiet, vindictive thrill at the thought. No one else lived inside the walls of Winterfell under Bolton control. None of them looked to the very men who should have been her allies and saw instead more of the same—more enemies. More traitors. She wanted them all to fall, and now, she has it. 

Not long after taking the crown, she made the Glovers suffer a similar, albeit less fatal, fate. She took from them. She took everything. She asked for Lord Glover to be brought before her as she sat on her carved throne. 

“The North has needed you and your men twice by my count,” she said. “Each time you have failed to deliver upon your promise to stand with us. The first was in our successful assault against Ramsay Bolton and the usurpers in the North. The second was the fight against the dead. Rather than choose, each time, to fight alongside us, to do what was right and what was hard but what was needed, you stayed at home. And did what, I wonder? While we faced down the foes of the North, our enemies, our potential annihilation. Inaction is a choice and it was one that sided you with our enemies. They are all dead now, gone, but in no thanks to you. We have secured the North and we have our independence, and through no expenditure of your own you now expect yourself and your House to reap the reward. There are a great many names for men like you, but I shall not bore you with their recitation.” She had let her mouth quirk upward and then flattened it out into a straight line. “We still have the remaining winter to contend with, and we have much hardship to see ourselves through to the other side of peace. It was my brother Jon Snow who asked I keep the faith where you and your family were concerned. My brother is no longer here, and I do not care to test your loyalty a third time only to find you wanting.” She paused. The Hall was silent, each body craned towards her, expectant and waiting. This, she knew, was power and it was dangerous.

Lord Glover stood before her, as defiant as he could manage even as his own fear began to fill his face. He did not so much pale as redden, the same bluster men get when their blood is hot or they have fallen too deep in the drink. 

“You are no one now. Your children will be no one. You may continue to live in the North,” she said. “But I will not count you among my lords. I strip you of the title. I take your lands from you and I shall give them to a loyal Northern family who has earned the honor. You shall no longer call Deepwood Motte your home. If you intend to stay you shall work the land that was once your father’s and his before him. The Glovers’ place in history ends here, today. The North remembers, and I beg that you remember, too. Disloyalty and cowardice will not be tolerated under my reign. Let it be known that any House that turns its back on the North shall suffer the consequences.”

So she elevated those loyal to her and those who served well in the two wars prior. She plucked those she could trust, if only a little, and placed them on her small council. Word of her cold wrath spread, her austerity, as she attempted to stockpile what little resources they had. She is trying, she had wanted to say, to make a better world. 

“A Queen’s power cannot rely alone on retaliation,” Lady Dustin had said to her, her mouth wry and bitter. “After all, as you surely know, a woman can only be one of two things: blessedly kind or irretrievably cruel. We shall have to choose wisely, won’t we, Queen Sansa?”

It is following moments like these that Sansa thinks of Daenerys. It is as if she is visited by a ghost. She wants to ask her, did she feel this way, too? Each decision questioned by those lesser than her, by those who did not know the full cost and demand of what they ask? She is trying to fix what has broken. She is trying to do good. She wants so desperately to be good—a good woman, a good leader, good in all the ways she knows she has failed in the past—and she wonders if Daenerys had ever felt the same. If she had felt that as she set fire to the smallfolk, the city streets of King’s Landing engulfed in dragon flame. From that high up, could she even see them? Did she know what she had done?

Did she like it?

Sansa, sleepless, rolls onto her back. Her skin sweats beneath the furs. Would she have liked it, too?

 

 

 

 

Sansa moves with haste through the corridors of Winterfell. Her small council waits for her. 

She is very much so alone as Queen. She has a small council of close advisors who, despite their unwavering allegiance to her and her reign, always favor their own interests. She expects this, but that does not mean she cares for it. She must sift through each morsel of advice and parse out which elements of it are self-serving and which will help the North. Weigh the cost and decide if it is worth it. She must prove herself, each step of the way, and ignore the furious, fearful tattoo that beats inside of her that all of this can be taken from her at any time. Running the North as Queen these years past has been much akin to attempting to scale the icy surface of the Wall in bare feet. She slips and she falls as much as she climbs. She grows weary with the effort.

She named Barbrey Dustin as the Hand of the Queen. There were so few for her to choose from; everyone she had known, had trusted, was gone, save for Lord Royce. It would not do, she did not need a Hand to tell her, to place a Lord not from the North in a position so close to the North’s Queen. She needed a fellow Northerner. In the early days, with Lady Dustin and her acid mouth, her high-necked black gowns, Sansa found if not comfort then familiarity in her. The North was as solid within her as it was within Sansa herself. 

Lady Dustin had been reluctant to take the role. Reluctant to come to Winterfell. Sansa had watched the woman assess her from before the dais where Sansa sat the throne, as she picked out each and every thing of Sansa’s that made her a Stark. “Gods know a wolf pup like you, Queen or not, will need honest counsel,” Lady Dustin said with a great sigh. "Best it come from me.”

Now, Sansa nods in her direction as she enters the small council chambers. The door shuts behind her and only when she is seated do the rest of them sit as well.

“Shall we begin?” With great dread, she is currently considering appealing to Bran’s court in the South for aid. She knows it will lead her straight into Bronn’s lap as the Master of Coin, and she cannot imagine a worse opportunity. He will destroy the North through loans and interest that she knows they will never be able to pay, even after the winter reaches its eventual end.

“Your Grace, if I may,” Lord Royce begins, “but I believe there is an obvious solution I see set before us.” Against Lady Dustin’s counsel, Sansa kept Lord Royce on her small council, both as a gesture to the Six Kingdoms, but also because she knew him and he knew her. He had come so far with her already.

Sansa bites the inside of her bottom lip. She expected as much, and here it is, the rope they keep trying to loop around her neck. Marriage. 

It is not the first time her council has broached the subject, but each time Sansa fruitlessly prays it will be the last. She had promised herself when she first sat the throne that so long as she was Queen in the North she would never wed for reasons of politics. She knew it at the time for the empty promise it was, and as the winter has marched on and on with less reprieve, the hollower it becomes. 

“And who is it you wish to crown as King, Lord Royce?”

“What you need, Your Grace, is someone with coin to spare,” Lady Dustin says with her usual tact. Lord Royce grimaces at the interruption but says nothing. “Which, obviously, excludes any Lord of the North.”

“Be that as it may, a Northern King would go a long way to ensure consolidation of the North,” Lord Blackwood counters. Sansa arches an eyebrow; Lord Blackwood must have a son in his pocket he wishes to see seated beside her. 

“No one is talking about consolidating the North. The North’s not going bloody anywhere. You know what breaks up a kingdom? Hunger. And what Northern Lord is sitting on stockpiles of grain and foodstuffs, because if it is all the same, Lord Blackwood, I’d rather see him tried for treason than given a crown.”

“That’s enough, Lady Dustin,” Sansa says. Lady Dustin isn’t wrong. A Northern husband would bring nothing to the table, least of all gold. If she must wed, she must make the act mercenary. She must marry someone prosperous, someone who could connect the North to the Six Kingdoms and with whom a future debt would not bankrupt the North. “If I am to marry a Southron Lord, then who do we suggest?”

“Your Grace, if I may,” Lord Overton says, “but Bronn of Highgarden would make an obvious choice, would he not? He has yet to wed, and a union with the Six Kingdoms’ Master of Coin could only aid our own coffers.”

“I’d be better suited to invite a snake into my bed and bare my throat for strangling. Next.”

“Your Grace, what of Robin Arryn of the Vale?” Lord Royce offers.

“Lord Royce, no,” she says softly. Despite having last seen Sweetrobin at Bran’s coronation, a man full-grown, she can’t help but think of him as the whining, sickly boy she had last seen at the Eyrie. She can’t help but think there must be a better option than him. 

“What of Quentyn Martell, Your Grace?” Lady Tallhart says.

“You expect the Prince of Dorne to leave Sunspear for Winterfell? He’d freeze before he made it north of The Reach.”

“Gendry Baratheon.” Lady Dustin does not say his name as a suggestion but rather as the solution. 

Sansa frowns. “Robert Baratheon’s bastard?”

“No longer, Your Grace.” Lord Royce ducks his head, a gesture of supplication he makes well and makes often. “As you must recall, the Dragon Queen gave him his father’s name and his lands. He is now Lord Baratheon of Storm’s End.”

“I recall.” Her words are tight. She has no care to think of that night, relieved as they all had been. She can still picture her, Daenerys, seated in the Hall. Their Hall. Jon, and his gaze had so easily traveled to her. She can hear her own voice, “ _why her?_ ” as she asked Tyrion the following day. Why her. She keeps her thoughts of Jon close and secret inside of her. She only ventures near them when it is late and she is alone. When she craves something that feels a lot like punishment. Jon is an open wound that will not heal in his absence. 

Sansa sighs deeply. She lets her rigid posture slip a fracture. She longs to cradle her head in her hands but she does not move. “If there was a solution other than,” she starts and then she stops herself. Complaint only breeds a presentation of weakness. 

“Peace, Your Grace. You must think of the North,” Lady Dustin says. Even at her gentlest, there is no give to her. “The realm.”

“Yes, the realm. The North. Both occupy my thoughts at length, and now they are to occupy my bedchamber as well.” She rises to her feet and begins to pace, each footfall slow and deliberate. “My brother is King of the Six Kingdoms. Does such a relationship not suffice to keep the peace?”

“Your Grace,” Lord Royce demurs. They have had this conversation before. She knows what he will say next. “It is not solely a matter of diplomatic relations or gold, but also.” He stops abruptly. He shakes his head, as if the next words he will say are too distasteful for him. She knows they are for her.

“An heir,” Lady Dustin says. “A successor. The longer you go without, the more endangered your queenship becomes.”

Sansa says nothing. There is no point in arguing.

Gendry Baratheon is not a terrible suggestion. He too has not wed as he has worked to restore House Baratheon to a shadow of its former glory. As he attempts to meet the role himself. There are worse options; she still cannot but hope for better. Together, they could keep the peace. The North would have access to Storm’s End and the supplies they have accumulated in the far less harsh winter South. Even as her thoughts turn to the snow and how impassable the journey north might be from Storm’s End, her sister ghosts around the perimeter of her thoughts. They were never the sort of sisters Sansa would see in King’s Landing during her time there. Noblewomen who sat together in the gardens and tittered over the lord that had caught her eye at the previous night’s feast. Deliriously whispered recounts of illicit kisses caught in vacant corridors and dark corners, of a father’s future disappointment. Of how she wants him so much she could die. Sansa and Arya never spoke to each other that way, but she knows. She knew. If Sansa believes in anything, she believes in the power of possession. It matters what you choose to call your own. Your land, your home, your family. Arya had called Gendry hers, or Gendry had called Arya his, or maybe they were lucky enough for a time for the possessive to be mutual. 

“Has there been any word from Arya?” she asks.

“Neither sight nor word of her, Your Grace.”

“And my brother?”

“Ah, the King? Your Grace?” She cuts her eyes to Lord Overton sharply. He knows that is not who she means. 

“Jon.” She continues to call Jon her brother. “The last thing we need is a remaining Targaryen threat to the peace we have created here today.” That had been what Tyrion had said. Tyrion thought in rebuilding you could take what was broken and if you held it in your hands it would reform itself into what it once was. You could pour the spilled wine back into the bottle. A damnable fool.

She can’t recall the last time she said his name out loud to another person. Sometimes she says his name to herself, alone. Not for fear of forgetting, but because there was a time when his name in her mouth was the closest thing she knew to a comfort. A long time ago now, as if both he and that time were things she had invented to survive. 

To want him here is enough. She has never bothered to interrogate why.

“The same, Your Grace. No word from Beyond the Wall. Our scouts have yet to find him.”

They’re gone. Arya and Jon have fallen off the known map. They both sought the parts of the world outside her and Bran’s reach, she thinks unkindly. They took one look at the pages of history and decided they wanted to live off-book. Anger stirs in her chest, soft and familiar. 

“Very well.” Her jaw twitches. In moments such as these, being a queen feels little different than working a brothel. “Extend an invitation to Lord Baratheon. Tell him the Queen in the North requests an audience.

 

 

 

 

She receives Lord Baratheon. He walks towards her as if he expects a beheading as opposed to her extended hand.

Sansa finds him a pleasant enough sight. He’s attractive, but she knew that already. He has grown into the title of Lord since she last saw him at Bran’s coronation, but the responsibilities and expectations still sit upon him like an ill-fitting suit of armor. As if he fears to move. His is built compact, shorter than her. He little resembles what she remembers of his father or his uncle Renly from their shared time in King’s Landing. The eyes, perhaps, if she wanted to assign something of his to his family.

“I thank you for joining me, Lord Baratheon,” she says. She shifts in her seat and the chain of her heavy necklace clinks. She still dresses much as she had as Lady of Winterfell. Her ladies have pressured her on all sides to alter her way of dress—to be more regal, per some, more feminine or less per others—but Sansa has done little to change. She feared then, and still now, to give away too many parts of herself, the deeper she waded into this new life.

“It is my pleasure. Your Grace,” he says stiffly. He’s nervous. That much is abundantly clear.

Small talk drags on awkwardly between them. They are alone, which she cannot decide was a mistake or not. Not, she thinks. She can only imagine Lady Dustin drawing and quartering Lord Baratheon with her sharp tongue and barely veiled insults. Sansa inquires after Storm’s End, about the state of the winter down South. He answers each question with an anxious and guarded politeness, not an ounce of caginess to be found in him. 

“You were a smith?” she says in an effort to fill the silence.

“I was, Your Grace. More of a hobby now, not that I find I’ve got the time for it.”

She nods. Enough of this. “You know why you were asked here, don’t you, Lord Baratheon?” The raven sent to Storm’s End had detailed her intentions as much; he can’t possibly be that guileless. If so, he’d make more of a pet than a husband. Perhaps when played right there is little difference to be found between the two. 

“Gendry, please.” He presses his hands together and leans forward, breathing deeply. “And though I would never dare assume, m’lady, Your Grace, yes. I know why I am here.”

She bites down on the wry smile that tries her mouth. “My council is under the impression that all of my, as well as the North’s and the Six Kingdoms’, problems would be solved if I were to marry.”

His throat bobs as he swallows. “Me?” His face is flushed. 

“Despite all we do and have done, men still consider the space between our legs our greatest asset,” Lady Dustin said to her that morning. She brushed her fingers over the hair that framed Sansa’s face. “It is a weapon. Use it wisely, Your Grace.”

“Yes,” she says to Gendry, the affirmation silky on her tongue. She does not let her eyes leave his. “You.” She has done the calculations in her head. Extensively. Backwards and forwards, well before the raven was sent south inviting him here today. His Baratheon name will earn him no favors in the North. She will not lose her men, nor her power, to him. The only problem was unmentionable to her own advisors, yet it sits here now, silent, between them. Arya. 

“I understand you were familiar with my sister.” She does not think there is much to be gained from approaching anything at a slant with Gendry. He strikes her as the sort who appreciates as much as understands bluntness. The force of a hammer, beating down the point. “I am afraid you will find little in common between her and I.”

“All respect, Your Grace, you’d be surprised.” There is a soft, sad smile on his face as he looks at her. She does not think he is actually seeing her, but rather her sister. The smile slips away and he clears his throat. “Have you not heard from her then?”

Sansa shakes her head. Nothing. Earlier on, she wrote often to Bran, asking him. She asked after Jon too. With Jon, she was told not to worry, which she knew meant that Bran had found him. He was beyond her reach, Beyond the Wall. With Arya, Bran had found nothing. “It has been years,” she says. “At a certain point you begin to wonder when you ask after her what it is you are asking.”

Gendry’s face darkens. “You think her dead.”

She studies him. She wants to tell him it doesn’t matter. “She is gone.” They all are, she does not say. She misses her. She misses all of them with an ache that never fades. She rises to her feet. “I have been alone for some time here in the North. I do not know if your advisors have cautioned you as to what a marriage to me would entail for you.” She turns to face him, her hands clasped behind her back. Her black skirts swirl at her ankles. “I will not leave the North. If we are to wed, we will remain here in Winterfell. You will retain Storm’s End as your right and title and for the purpose of our union, but the management of it will fall to another.”

“It was explained. Your Grace.”

Each time he says the title it is like something sticky in his mouth. Unnatural. Despite the passage of years since the adoption of his own title, the formalities of it still trip him up. She can see that much. She can also see Gendry has his own issues to contend with should he accept her proposal of marriage. Even though the War of the Five Kings ended years ago, loyalists to Stannis Baratheon still remain scattered at Storm’s End. They have little interest in a jumped-up bastard masquerading as Lord, least of all the bastard of Robert Baratheon. His marriage to her, and therefore his absence in Storm’s End, would only cede them a greater opportunity to grab hold of more power. Though that is not, as Lord Royce reminded her, her problem. 

“And you are willing to sacrifice it? Your family’s ancestral home?”

“Up until recent, Your Grace, I could not call the Baratheon name or Storm’s End my own. My attachment to both is in honor and pride alone. I have not yet made it a home, not as you speak of Winterfell.”

Sansa considers him anew. There is generosity in him. The unvarnished honesty that comes with the smallfolk, she thinks. He says what he means, and it is a relief after years of careful words and double meanings and bladed threats. Perhaps a union with him will be a far cry from what she has previously known as marriage. A spark that feels a lot like hope begins to light inside her chest; she quickly smothers it.

“Then we are understood.”

“Do you wish to marry me? Your Grace?” he hastily adds. Sansa can’t help but narrow her eyes in amusement. He was doing so well. He sounded near enough a Lord. Until now. The question is hurried and earnest and lacks the precision and subterfuge she learned in Joffrey’s court, at Cersei Lannister’s table, and Petyr Baelish’s knee. 

“Wish is not a word I often employ. Wish and want will never rank over necessity.”

“You need to marry me?”

She looks to the man who is to be her husband. “You would not be here otherwise.”

 

 

 

 

The day of her wedding to Gendry arrives. Dara, her handmaid, helps her to get ready. She trusts Dara. Or, she trusts her as much as she is capable of understanding or extending such a thing as that to another person. Dara served as her handmaid even before Sansa was crowned Queen. She listens well and she knows how to keep a confidence. There are other women in Sansa’s life, all jockeying for if not power then recognition, and none measure up by either metric near as well. While Winterfell is nothing like the court at King’s Landing— far fewer courtiers and even less intrigue—Lord Manderly sent both of his daughters, Wynafryd and Wylla, to serve as her ladies. Beth Cassel serves her similarly. Sansa leaves them largely to their own devices. There was a time when she would have enjoyed little more than her own retinue of ladies. Now, she finds she wants little more than quiet. 

Dara’s fingers move quickly as they braid and knot long strands of Sansa’s hair. She hums in approval as she works. Sansa studiously avoids her reflection in the glass set before her. Her entire body is tight with tension, her jaw locked. She works hard not to think of the last time she prepared herself for marriage, inside these very walls. It will not be the same. She knows this. Gendry is nothing like Ramsay. 

“Did your lady mother and lord father love each other very much when they were wed?” Dara asks. 

Sansa looks up in surprise. Dara is watching Sansa in the glass. Sometimes Sansa forgets that Dara was not raised here. Perhaps she has forgotten that her mother had been promised to her uncle Brandon but married her father after Uncle Brandon’s death.

“No,” Sansa says.

“Like anything worth having,” her mother used to say, the same cadence she would use for any other bedtime story, “it took time.”

Dara lifts her mouth in a grin. “Be patient, Your Grace.” Her grin widens. “He is very handsome, at the least.”

She is not wrong. That evening, as Sansa approaches him, waiting at the weirwood tree in the godswood, she thinks the same thing: he is very handsome, at the least. His shoulders are strong and capable and his face is kind, masculine. She breathes deeply as she comes ever closer to him. Her husband. The King in the North.

 

 

 

 

The wedding reception is a subdued affair, in deference both to the winter and its stubborn darkness as well as the tightened purse strings to see them through it. Sansa does not mind; she long ago soured on the prospect of a grand wedding. 

All too soon she finds herself alone in the her bedchamber with him. Her husband. Their bedchamber now, she reminds herself. 

Gendry stands by the door, as if prepared to leave should she ask him to, his hands clasped awkwardly before him. She thinks he might be well prepared to do anything she might ask of him. She feels both hot and cold, ready herself to bolt from the room. Instead, she stands her ground. 

“I’ll need help undressing,” she finally says, quiet but firm. 

A stunned look crashes over his face, like caught prey. He remains still for a moment, perhaps reconciling himself to the reality of it same as she attempts to do. When he comes to her, he takes her hand in his. His hands are warm and heavily callused and he squeezes hers lightly in his grip. Again, he provides her the ease of escape. She half-wishes he would crush her hand in his. 

“I will be a good husband to you, and a good king to my people,” Gendry says. “I swear it.”

Sansa allows her mouth to smile. “It is appreciated.” He is very simple, she thinks. She does not mean dumb—uncomplicated, more like. He does not see the world in variants but rather in absolutes. That, she hopes, should make their future easier. 

Gendry eyes drift down from her face to her dress with obvious unease. She lifts her arm so he might unlace her. “Here,” she says, and his fingers set to work. Despite his uncertainty, he is deft with his hands. She watches him work, his head bowed, and she lets the weight of her dress fall from her frame. 

Gendry takes a step back from her. A dance, and she is meant to lead. She tries not to frown. He is making this more difficult than it needs to be. He keeps giving her a pathway out. 

Sansa takes a deep breath and she steps forward, to him. She kisses him, her lips dry and light against his, in a desperate bid to hurry this along. Relieve him of his doubts. The stubble grown in along his chin scratches at her own face. She feels her shoulders go rigid as he brushes his hand over her jaw, as he tries to deepen the kiss. Her hands curl into fists at her side. It’s too intimate. She wishes herself to be pliant, to fall into his arms the way that girls do in the stories—the handsome husband and his gentle hands, his loving mouth. All she is missing is a willing body.

Gendry’s mouth is wet as it opens against hers, as it opens hers, his tongue seeking along the seam of her lips. She can taste the faintest bit of ale on him as he kisses her, careful purpose without passion. She mainly tastes flesh, spit, both his. He cradles her jaw as if he fears too much pressure will make her break. She does not think she has ever been touched like this by any man. Not with this degree of care and intent, absent darker motive. She remembers Petyr’s hands on her face, she can recall him calling her beautiful, but each time he touched her it was as if he held a completely different woman— _girl_ —than herself. And Ramsay—he conflated her body with violence, sex with violence, and she finds it remains a tangled knot inside of her she lacks the deftness to properly undo. She wants to cower from Gendry, not because she fears him, but because the past lives on even after working so hard to escape it. 

She closes her eyes and she breathes. Her lips move against his. She remembers different hands on her face, hands that cradled her face as his lips pressed dry and warm to her forehead. _Jon_ , she thinks, only a name, covetous as she longs to place it in her mouth. He held her as a brother, she lies. She opens her eyes, makes herself look at Gendry. 

She takes him to the bed. She helps him with her shift, her smallclothes beneath. She has scarring high on her thigh from where Ramsay had cut her as punishment. Punishment, or entertainment—the two had blurred nauseatingly with him. For so long she has ignored the marks he left her with; the only person to see them and bear witness to what he had done to her was herself. The skin is still raw-looking, crepe-like and ragged, below the crease where thigh meets hip, well above the line of her stockings. She has become accustomed enough to the ugliness of it that she does not notice it herself anymore. It, like a great many terrible things, has become a part of her.

It is another good lie, and most days she believes it. Gendry’s reaction brings it all back to her.

He frowns, his mouth pursed like he wants to ask her something. He is all soft uncertainty and painful kindness. She has to look away from the dumb shock on his face as his eyes travel back down to her thigh. Some men are like that, she knows. They lack the cruel imagination to think of all the ways people might find to hurt each other. It’s not as soothing as she would like that he lacks this. If you lack the imagination, then you cannot defend against it. 

Gendry treats the entire consummation as if they should be in a sept instead of their bedchamber. Careful and deliberate, he touches her only lightly and briefly, as if he expects her to rear back from him in either terror or revulsion. The extraordinary caution makes her want to laugh, near giddy with it. It’s the thought of Arya that does it. Attempting to imagine her sister with even the barest semblance of patience. But then, he most likely wasn’t patient with Arya. He wanted her. This is his duty. She sobers quickly. 

This is her duty, too. Always that: duty. What was it that Tyrion had said that Jon had told him? Love is the death of duty. Duty is the death of love. Nothing here feels that monumental, and yet. Jon. He doesn’t belong here, she tells herself. She wishes he was. That he did. For as careful as Sansa is with each and every thought or plan she has, she does not let herself interrogate this. Jon lurks in the darkest corners of her. Maybe he always has. She pushes him away now.

She finds the physicality of the act to be near unbearable. His hands on her bare skin. His hands parting her thighs, so slowly. She refuses to look down her body; she will not see what he sees. The last time a man was inside her was against her will. She breathes deep again and she braces herself. Tries to relax herself. She remembers what she has overheard other women say over the years, from King’s Landing up to Winterfell. Tension will do nothing but make it hurt that much more. She closes her eyes. The dark is worse; she opens them. Gendry’s face, handsome as it is, is marred with concern, his own conflicted desire. 

There are too many things a woman is asked to bear, even a queen. She makes herself look at him. Watch him. She watches him take himself in hand; his erection has not waned despite her own lack of enthusiasm or encouragement. She will not let her thoughts dwell on that. Men and their cocks, she thinks instead, the vulgarity sparking something in her. Not only are they ruled by them, but the rest of the world suffers for it. She spreads her legs that much wider for him. She waits for the pain. 

Instead, Gendry reaches a hand between her legs and begins to rub at her. Sansa shifts under him. 

“What are you doing?” The question is sharp and overloud in the bedchamber. 

Gendry looks at her, again with that stumped and open confusion, at a loss as to how to explain himself. “I’m getting you ready,” he finally says. 

“There is no need,” she snaps. “Just, go ahead. Do it.” And there it is: the edges of herself she has sharpened rather than smoothed down throughout her life, the life that has brought her here. She shows that to him, bares that to him. It’s easier than her body. Easier than the space between her legs his fingers clumsily travel over, expecting more than she knows she will be able to give him. Isn’t entrance enough? Isn’t that all that is asked of her? 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, and he most likely means it.

_As if you could_ , she thinks unkindly. _Go ahead and try_ , she does not say. 

Instead, she meets his eye and she says, “You won’t.” She does not let herself wince as he pushes himself inside her.

 

 

 

 

The early days of her marriage to Gendry are marked by push and pull as she attempts to manage both her husband and the future of the North. Sansa has grown so used to being alone that she does not know how to share. She has never known how to share. 

Neither of her marriages before this, mockeries as they were, taught her anything as to how to treat with a husband such as Gendry. She tries to think of her mother and her father; all she earns for her troubles is a deeper sorrow. She prays to the Old Gods. She asks for patience and for wisdom. She does not ask to be kind.

She lays with him regularly, fully aware that she needs an heir. She has yet to conceive, her body flat and unchanged, and night after night Gendry reaches for her, a stoic look of resignation shading his face that she fears too well matches her own. Despite that, he makes it last too long. He is too gentle with her. She endures him, her body yet another instrument of power. She has learned to trace the cracks in the ceiling above the bed. She has learned the texture of his shoulder, the stretch and bend of his collarbone beneath his skin, the way he throat trembles and catches before he spends inside of her. After, he likes to touch her face, his fingers barely ghosting down the side of her cheek, and he will tell her she is beautiful. At first, it sounded as if he buried an apology in the words, but as of late, more and more unspoken resentment has crept in. She does not know what to do with that. She does not know how to be a wife. She turns away from him.

Desire, Sansa believes, is a conspiracy everyone is a part of except her. It would be so easy if she could close her eyes and when she opens them find that she wants him. She wants her husband’s hands on her, she wants to feel the weight of him, over and inside her.

Nothing easy has ever come to Sansa. It shall not start now. 

She finds it difficult to sleep with him and just as difficult to sleep beside him. She found it difficult to sleep before she wed him. 

She does not dream. She counts this as a blessing.

 

 

 

 

The conflicts of their marriage are not bound solely to the bedchamber, but the North at-large. The first, and most obvious, conflict is negotiating for supplies and grain to be sent up from Storm’s End. Before the wedding, Lady Dustin had asked Sansa if she intended to take the Stormlands as her own now that she was to marry Gendry.

“I merely aim to keep the peace and provide us further aid. I have the North. The Free Folk have their freedom.” Lady Dustin did not comment on that. It was an open secret that Sansa’s devotion to protect the Free Folk stemmed from one impulse. “I have no interest in the South. The Stormlands will remain under Bran’s rule.”

Despite Lady Dustin’s acquiescence to her, she can still see the glint that continues to shine in Lady Dustin’s eye. She is a woman who eyes the horizon and sees not what should be guarded against but rather what should be sought and taken. It runs contrary to every impulse Sansa knows. Lady Dustin belies nothing more of expansion, at least not to Sansa and not to the small council. But Sansa knows enough: a Hand with aspirations that far outpace her monarch’s will eventually threaten any delicate balance achieved to rule. A month into her marriage to Gendry, Sansa put a worm in Lord Royce’s ear to pay close attention to the small council and inform her immediately if Lady Dustin started to solicit interest in laying claim to anything in the South. 

“You doubt your Hand?” he asked. 

“It is everyone I doubt, Lord Royce.”

She should have doubted Gendry more. He is utterly artless at politics. While this earns him little to no respect with her small council, the majority of her Northmen adore him. They appreciate his lack of refinement more than they would a King gilded in the capital and delivered ready to rule. They chuckle appreciably when he blunders his way through his addresses to gatherings in the Great Hall and join him late into the evening over shared ale and reminisces of wars not nearly long past enough. She sits coldly beside him on her throne as he wins over her own men.

Sansa can’t help but resent him for it. That he can get away with knowing nothing or little of politics, of how to play the game, when she has worked so hard to achieve the same he has now. Respect has taken so much time and so much effort for her to harness. She fears nothing more than the ease with which she can lose it. 

“And while none of our ships have yet to be lost to their fleet, they grow bolder with every strike,” Lord Overton is saying to the small council. The Ironborn are restless. They have returned to their reaving and pillaging, past promises buried beneath a thick layer of discontent. 

“I thought they promised they wouldn’t,” Gendry says. Sansa refuses to look at him. He sounds so naive, hardly a King. 

“Yes, Your Grace, they did,” Lady Dustin says. Her voice says far more than words ever could. Sansa finally glances to her right to find Gendry still sitting tall, not a bit of him cowed by her Hand. 

“And promises mean nothing?” Sansa just barely restrains herself from rolling her eyes.

“Earnestness has no place in politics,” she says to him when they are alone later that night. “You’ll earn nothing from assuming the best in people but a blade to the throat.”

“You sounded like her, just then,” he says after a long moment. “Arya.” Sansa freezes. It is the first time he has said her name out loud since they wed. She says nothing. Eyes her side of the bed with no wish to enter. 

“I asked her to marry me. Did you know that?” Sansa lifts her head in surprise. She hadn’t. Gendry is constantly trying to tell her things of himself, trying to draw her own story from her. She knows a husband and wife are not meant to be strangers to each other, but at the end of the day she is tired. She is tired of being who everyone wants her to be. She cannot continue or learn a new performance for him in private. 

“When?”

“Years ago. That night, when Queen Daenerys made me a Baratheon. I had a name and a title and land to call my own. I had never been happier. And Arya—I wanted to be happy with her. So I asked.”

Sansa already knows what Arya must have said. “Did you truly think Arya would settle for a life as a lady alongside a lord?”

“I shouldn’t have, but. I wanted it. That felt like enough for me.”

 

 

 

 

“Wildlings!” The call first went up outside the gate. The rider who came through into the yard repeated the call as his horse stamped in circles. “Wildlings!”

They ride towards Winterfell under a white flag and from her view high up in the tower, Sansa strains to make out who ranks among them. She need not; she already knows. She does not try to disguise her joy as she watches their approach. Not, at least, for a moment. That moment is hers and she feels her mouth crack into a wide, rusty grin before she reassembles herself. It would do no good to be seen treating a Wilding coalition with her own wild exuberance.

Sansa turns to her ladies. “Shall we go down to greet them?”

In the yard her men surround her. Next to her, Gendry stands, watchful and quiet. She waits, her heart thudding with anticipation in her chest, as the gate is first unbolted and then opened. It’s Tormund she recognizes first, his hair bright in the chilly afternoon gloom. Beside him is Jon. 

She watches as Jon dismounts. She grips her hands before her and she wills herself still. She finds it difficult to swallow, emotion threatening hot and vital within her. She makes herself wait for him. He looks older to her, even at a distance. His face is more worn and thinner, as if the winter and perhaps more than that has found a way to whittle him down.

“Stand down,” she says softly to her guards, and they do. They part and there is nothing that stands between them. 

She wants to ask Bran how it’s possible, for history to repeat itself. Never in perfect rhyme but always uncanny enough to make you wonder what allowed you to arrive at this, a point you all but feel, know, you have already lived. It is cold, as cold as the day she arrived at The Wall. She is a different woman than the girl who had run to him and thrown her arms around him, but she finds that difficult to reconcile now. It’s all she wants—to run to him, throw her arms around him. Cling to him and believe, if only for a second, that she is safe.

Instead she makes Jon come to her. 

When they had said goodbye, she had assumed it was just that: farewell. But here he is, in front of her. The same Jon, but so markedly different. “Sansa,” he says, and, yes, that sounds right, too. His voice, his own. Her name in his mouth his, too. 

Jon draws her into an embrace. He holds her body close to his and she clutches him to her. He’s warm. He smells of the cold and his damp furs but also so painfully familiar she feels her fingers curl and catch that much tighter at his back. She mourns the loss the moment he pulls back from her

Tormund approaches them. He looks down at her with bright, amused curiosity.

“Wolf Queen,” he says. His mouth cracks into a pleased grin. “The role suits you.”

“Tormund,” she says. He has not changed a bit; she finds an odd relief in the fact. 

She remembers herself just as she feels Gendry shift beside her. To both men she says, “May I present Gendry of House Baratheon, the King in the North.”

Jon has never been skilled at marshaling his own facial expressions. That much has not changed about him. Both shock and recognition crash over his face before he nods, mute. 

Tormund turns to Gendry. “So you married the small man,” he says, teasing obvious in his voice, unclear if it is pointed more so at her than Gendry. He is shorter even than Jon and both her and Tormund stand tall over the two men. He claps Gendry hard on the shoulder and he laughs. 

“It’s good to see you too again, I guess,” Gendry says warmly. Sansa frowns. She had forgotten that the three of them had traveled Beyond the Wall together, back before the Wall had been decimated. 

But Jon smiles at her, his eyes crinkled at the corners. “And allow me to present the King Beyond the Wall,” he says. He clutches Tormund’s arm and gives the man a shake. Tormund clearly has no interest in the title. A look of annoyance flashes over his face, directed at Jon.

“I thought you had no kings,” Sansa says.

“Not as Westeros does. A man must earn the honor.”

“Then congratulations are in order, I suppose,” she says. Her gaze drifts over to Tormund. He looks much as the King of the Wildlings would look, she supposes, in the average Northerner’s nightmares. He looks the sort of King that Old Nan would have told tall tale of to them. He has no weapon in his hand but it requires very little imagination to put one there. 

“It has been some time,” Sansa says. She slips back easily into her role as Queen. She often finds it easiest to play this part as opposed to the other. Sansa, the woman they gossip is too young to rule. Sansa, the lonely girl who goes most nights without restful sleep. _Sansa_ , the woman who Jon called by name. “Not that I do not appreciate your visit, but I must ask what brings you and yours to Winterfell.”

“Aye.” Jon nods. “We come with business.”

 

 

 

 

Tormund, the King Beyond the Wall, wishes to establish open trade between the Free Folk and the North. Or, Sansa supposes, she should say Jon wishes to establish open trade and he has successfully convinced Tormund to go along with his plan. For it is Jon who drives the discussion, it is Jon who presents the plan, and it is Tormund who interjects at random with his own doubts, occasionally undercutting the very premise—Jon’s premise—presented to her.

“It is not the best idea,” Lady Dustin tells her in private later. “But it is far from the worst. Your lords will despise you for it.”

As unexpected as their visit, Sansa finds it equally unexpected to spend the following two days absorbed by trade negotiations with the Free Folk. The bulk of the second day’s conversations revolves around the abandoned castles left by the Night’s Watch along the Wall, or what remains of it. Nineteen castles stand along the Wall. When Jon had served in the Night’s Watch only three had been operable. When Sansa had taken them, all were in varying states of disrepair.

The Night’s Watch predictably collapsed after Jon deserted Beyond the Wall and was subsequently disbanded. Sansa reclaimed the territory ceded to the Night’s Watch in the name of the North. In the years since, she dispatched scouts out to those dilapidated castles and settlements but none had ever reported back anything of interest. Wherever Jon had gone, he had gone deep and far. Until now.

“I thought the Free Folk had no need of castles,” Lady Dustin says, dry as bone.

“We don’t,” Tormund says. Again, Sansa finds herself studying him, leader to leader. Unlike her, he sits low and slouched in his seat at the round table, everything about him stating loud and clear he would prefer to be anywhere but here. For as jovial as she has seen him in the past, vulgar and entertained, he is imposing, unreadable, now.

“We don’t want the castles to live in,” Jon says. “We want them for trade. We make them into trading outposts, between ourselves and you.” A neutral zone, she thinks. Since the start of her reign the clashes between her men and the Free Folk have been few and far between. The Free Folk have stuck to their territory Beyond the Wall. 

“The winter must have been hard on you,” Sansa says. “To come so far.” _For our aid_ , she smartly does not say. _To see me_. 

“It has,” Jon says.

Tormund rolls his head lazily in Jon’s direction. “Your Jon Snow had much to get used to again after spending so long with you kneelers.” The teasing has returned to his voice, cut through with more than a hint of menace. “Though even our camp, cold enough to freeze a man’s pecker clean off, is a better spot than your stone dungeons, aye?”

Sansa meets Tormund’s eye. There’s a challenge there, as if respect is only to be earned first through testing. 

“You might recall, King Tormund, it was not I who put my brother in chains but rather I who fought to free him from them.”

“How could I forget, Queen Sansa?” She resists the urge to grin back at him, all teeth. They bandy their titles about, more as playful insult than anything else, though the edge is there. He is a proud man, she knows. It displeases him to come here, to ask for anything—least of all a castle. 

“I will grant you one. Castle Black. It shall be a trial basis. The castle will be yours, to be established as a trading outpost. Dependent on how this,” she casts for the right word to use, “experiment proceeds, more castles may be granted. We shall first see how this current arrangement works.”

She looks to Jon, something heavy and warm to be found there. Something familiar.

 

 

 

 

The Free Folk are to leave the following morning. They feast them that evening. Despite their appetite it is a slighter feast than the Great Hall of Winterfell has hosted in the past. It is inexcusable in her estimation for her lords and ladies to gorge themselves as the rest of the North struggles and scamps and starves. 

Her people agreed if only, she supposes, because they have no desire to break bread with the Free Folk. The Hall is neatly divided, each table solely Northmen or Free Folk, save for the head table where she sits with Jon and Tormund, Gendry at her side. 

Their conversation lurches forward, in awkward starts and stops, as if none of them know best how to cover the intervening years endured apart with small talk. There is only so much of the winter to speak of, only so many updates on the state of the North and of the greater realm. Of Bran their dialogue becomes its most cautious, neither sure how to speak of their brother and the King he has become. They skirt around the unspoken—the wars waged that brought them to this very table, those they buried so they might sit here. So she might wear a crown. 

“I imagine you look forward to returning to Beyond the Wall.” She is not sure who she directs this comment to—Tormund, perhaps, but her gaze is trained on Jon. 

“Yes,” Jon replies. He nods, as if continuing the conversation, privately and without her. “We shall rest well knowing we have reached an agreement with your court.”

“And maybe you will finally find rest as well,” Gendry says to her. It is unexpected; she turns her head quickly to him. “She does not sleep,” he says, his attention turned to the other two men. She had not realized he had noticed. It leaves her feeling unbalanced, seen when she had not realized she was trying to hide. 

“Of course. An unquiet mind will lead to no rest,” Tormund says. He raises a forkful of food to his mouth. 

“And how might one quiet a restless mind?” she asks.

Tormund shrugs. “Three things always work for me: drinking, killing, or fucking.”

Sansa does not react, her gaze upon him is cold. 

“I’ve heard a cup of warm goat’s milk works as well,” he offers, as close to conciliatory as she can imagine him ever being.

Jon, for his part, says nothing.

 

 

 

 

Sansa finds Jon alone down in the crypts after the feast. She studies him from afar before she approaches him. His silhouette is as familiar as her own shadow to her.

But she can see, even at a distance, that Jon is a different man than the one who left. That man was different still from the man who had first gone to Dragonstone. Sansa is certain that Jon thinks of himself as unchanging and constant, the lone solid thing he knows in this world. He is no such thing. He is so wholly different each time she sees him after each extended absence it makes something within her ache. 

“I thought I would find you down here,” she says. He waits until she is alongside him before he turns to look at her. While he does not say aloud, _you were looking for me?_ , his face says as much. 

“I wanted to pay my respects, before.” He does not complete the thought. Before he leaves, she thinks. For all she has achieved as Queen she has yet to learn how to make a person stay with her. 

“You married Gendry,” Jon finally says.

“Yes. I did.”

“Is he good to you?”

She grants him a small smile. “I would not tolerate less.”

Jon returns her smile, softer and briefer. He flattens his mouth into a line. “Does he love you?”

“Stop it.” There is another conversation happening here, buried beneath the words they state. Neither knows how to say what they mean to each other, not anymore. Maybe they never did. Maybe they never understood what it was they could not will themselves to state. She thinks of each night she has spent with Gendry, each time she has pushed thoughts of Jon away.

“I had hoped you would say, ‘I would not tolerate less.’”

“I said stop.” She puts as much of her queenly authority into her voice as she can manage. She watches it register with Jon, as it fills the crypt. He lifts his chin but his face does not change. Even now, so serious. His time apart, his time spent with the people he has claimed as his own, has done little to temper that severity, that stony resolve of his.

“Has it helped?”

Panic rushes through her, as if the true heart of her could be seen that easily. “Helped what?” He cannot possibly mean where her mind first goes: her loneliness. 

“The realm.”

Sansa exhales through her nose, both irritated and at ease. “It solidified relations between the North and the Six Kingdoms. Isn’t that all anyone could ask of a marriage?” she says drily. Jon’s mouth lifts but he does not laugh. “I need an heir,” she says suddenly. She watches his face drop. “Unlike Bran’s court in the South, the North will handle the matter of succession same as it always has. I need a child to solidify my reign, and therefore I needed a husband.” Her gaze drifts over to the statue of Lyanna. Jon has placed a candle, lit, in her cupped hands.

“Even with a crown,” she says, her gaze still fixed on the flickering flame, “they still tell you what you need to do. I should have known better. I’ve seen what power does to people. What people do to those in power. For whatever reason, I told myself I could be untouchable.” She turns back to Jon. “And now I’m married.”

And there it is, that lost look on Jon’s face. Unmoored and set adrift, he looked at her similarly, back then. Before. When she asked him why he bent the knee to Daenerys.

“I’m,” and he pauses. “I’m grateful, that you received me. I know I shouldn’t have come. That I shouldn’t break my exile.”

Sansa frowns. “Nonsense,” she says, sharper than she intended. “The Night’s Watch is disbanded, and Bran is very far away. The Unsullied are even farther.” She pauses; she makes sure he is looking at her. “It’s only me you have to contend with. And I welcome your return.”

“Gods, I’ve missed you,” he says, his words broken by what could be the start of a laugh or something worse. He makes it sound like begging.

“And I’ve missed you.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. She watches as his breath leaves him in one heady rush. 

“When last we saw each other,” she continues, “I asked you for your forgiveness. I ask you for it again.”

“Sansa.” His face is aggrieved and he quickly ducks it so as not to have to look at her. Her chest tightens. “I do. Of course I do. I have to, I suppose.” He lifts his face to her. “I try not to think…”

“Of me?” _I think of you all the time_ , she does not say.

“Of what was done. What I did.” He looks very tired to her, older than he should. Perhaps he sees similar when he looks upon her. “Yes, I forgive you. You did what you must for the North. And look at what you have achieved.” He tries to smile, and that is worse than glowering at her.

She feels a familiar lick of anger within her. He speaks to her as if she is the lone penitent here. Her anger threatens to overwhelm her. She still remembers what the septa had taught her when she was a girl. It does no good for a woman to stow anger inside of her, to keep it burning hot in her belly, the lid on too tight to let any of the steam escape. Any grudge. Any glimmer of heat. A woman must forgive. A woman must douse the flames.

“You’ve never asked me for mine,” she says. Her voice is tight, her posture rigid. 

“For your what?”

“My forgiveness.”

“What?” he says again. 

“You left me,” she says. “Three times, by my count, you left me. After you promised me you would protect me.” The words are sharp, as cold as the crypt they stand in. She feels both lighter and heavier, as if she has unearthed something buried so deeply inside herself, that she has lived with for so long, she had all but forgotten it was there.

“You didn’t need my protection.” She wants to hate Jon for all the gentleness he still possesses. Here, and with her. After everything.

“When you left me for Dragonstone, Petyr Baelish did all he could to tear apart what we had worked so hard to take back. I ordered Arya to slit his throat and I watched her do it. When you left me for King’s Landing all I had here were the dead. We’d find bodies in the strangest of places throughout Winterfell, days even after you left with her. The smell—gods, burnt and rot and it wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t—I had to start the reconstruction, on my own. We had so few men left and it was cold and we burnt so much wood defending ourselves. And when you went away, as far North as you could take yourself, I took back the lands that had belonged to the Umbers and the Karstarks. They all were dead, and I was glad for it. I gave it all to new families. I took what was the Glovers and gave that away, too. I let it be known betrayal would not be tolerated in the North. I had to rebuild an army. I had to find us food and I had to look upon those who starved. Who froze. Who died. They doubted me. They still doubt me. They blame me, for the devastation you all left me with.” She swallows. “I kept the peace with the realm. And I waited. I learned from the best, Jon, and I know. It is only a matter of time before I will find a knife in my back and it will be from a hand I know well.” She feels tired, exhausted at her own words. “I married a Baratheon and I made him King.”

“Why are you telling me this?” The low timbre of his voice is laced with dread.

“I may not have needed your protection.” She swallows again, fast, but she wills the words forward all the same. Into her mouth, at the back of her teeth. “But I needed you.”

“Sansa.” He tips his head towards hers. He is too close to her. She can feel the brush of his hair against her forehead, the heat of his breath. “Please.”

“Please what?”

She feels the brush of his fingers against the bare skin of her throat. It is nothing like when Gendry takes her to bed. She does not wish to draw her body away from him but rather to lean into his touch. To have him brand her with it. It’s wrong, it has always been wrong, but it is so easy in the cold dark of the crypt to let her eyes flutter shut, to let her body bend towards his and his warmth. To let herself acknowledge the ugly truth that has long lived inside of her. This is what she wants. He is who she wants. She opens her eyes.

Sansa is the one to kiss him first. Tentatively, she closes the gap between them. She keeps her eyes open, watches as his own flutter shut. Watches the minute way he leans into her before her mouth has even touched his. This was never anything she could admit to herself as wanting. Jon, if he was anything to her, if he was everything, he was something, someone, she wanted to possess. She wanted to keep him.

Her lips barely touch his own, glancing off of his mouth, though the intent behind it is anything but chaste. She takes a deep breath in and she can feel as much as hear his own ragged breath in reply. What comes next will be irrevocable; she presses her mouth firmer to his. His fingers catch in her hair and he pulls her closer to him. 

They both kiss each other as if they have spent far too long thinking about it. She aches with it, gasps when her mouth opens to him and he enters, his tongue has hot and slick as she feels between her legs. To kiss him is both ugly and visceral, necessary, a culmination of something she has wanted and feared. She clings to him, pushes her tongue against his, tastes the inside of his mouth, propelled by a violent sense of both longing and wrongness.

Jon pushes her back. The wall is cold and rough at her back, but his thigh is between her legs. She can feel him against her. She has never felt both so far outside and so much a part of herself. She thinks it even as she feels Jon pull away from her.

Panting, he stands before her. His hands still hold fast along her waist, her hip. She runs her fingers down the side of his face. The scars are still there, the both of them ever marked by the past.

“It was never supposed to be like this,” she says, as sad as she’s ever said anything.

“Please, don’t.”

“You’re Aegon Targaryen,” she whispers. “You will always be a Stark to me, but you are Aegon Targaryen. That throne was meant to be yours.” She closes her eyes and she bends her head towards him, clutching the back of his skull. “Not Joffrey’s, not Bran’s. Not Daenerys’s.” She opens her eyes. “Yours.”

“Do not say her name.” She can feel his body go rigid against hers. She drops her hands. She leans back against the wall, chilled even through her cloak. 

“Look at you,” she says quietly. “Even now.”

“I’m not Aegon. I have never been Aegon. The only man I have been and the only man I know how to be is Jon Snow.”

“And you could’ve been him and ruled us all.” _You could’ve stood by my side_ , she does not say.

“I didn’t want it! How many times, Sansa, must I tell you? I didn’t want it. I don’t want it.”

“You lead your Wildlings just fine,” she all but spits at him. She can still taste his mouth on hers.

“Tormund leads them. He is the King Beyond the Wall. And,” Jon shakes his head, “the Free Folk are nothing like leading the Seven fucking Kingdoms.” She doesn’t know if she has ever heard him curse like that in her presence. He has always been so careful with her. Too careful; never careful enough. “Bran is doing well with it, isn’t he? You’re doing fine. You’re all doing fine without me.” He fixes her with a hard stare. “Don’t tell me you didn’t want it. I know you. You’ve wanted to be Queen all your life. And now, despite the cost, you have it.”

Despite the cost. He will never forgive her, she thinks desperately. Despite what he says, in his heart he sees her holding the blade just as much as himself as it pierced Daenerys’s chest. She did what she had to do to protect the North. She would do it again. And now, she may keep the North, but she has lost him.

She holds a hand to her cheek, as if to ward off any tears. Her skin is hot and flushed beneath the ice of her hand.

“I never wanted to do it alone,” she says. Emotion catches in her throat all the same.

Jon cups her face in his hands. He covers her own hand on her cheek. “You’re not alone now.” She wants to bend into his warmth again but she keeps herself still. “You have Gendry,” he says.

He might as well have slapped her.

 

 

 

 

The Free Folk prepare to depart the following day. Sansa looks down on the yard from up on the ramparts as she watches them load their horses. She hears approaching footsteps and glances up. Tormund. 

“Jon tells me I’m to thank you for your hospitality. Manners, he calls them.” He stands beside him, his hands large as they wrap around the rail. Her mouth twitches.

“Or gratitude.” She looks away from him and back down onto his men. Women, too. As hardy as the men they travel with, their strength unquestioned. “We were pleased to host you and pleased to see you all again.”

“Aye, _we_ were pleased to see you as well.” She does not miss his purposeful emphasis on the word, as if he knows she speaks solely of herself but refuses to own it alone. Below them, Jon crosses the yard.

She had hoped it was him who would come to her. She has not been alone with him since the night before in the crypts, and she is certain now she will not be again before he leaves.

“How is he doing, really?” she asks. She does not look over to Tormund but instead watches Jon. “He doesn’t tell me. Not the truth, or the whole truth, not even if I were to ask.”

Tormund does not answer immediately. She glances over at him. He runs a hand over his mouth and his beard, the expression on his face considering. His mouth bends as he looks down at her. “He’s well, I suppose. For Jon Snow. Boy’s never been a great laugh, has he?” His face smoothes into something more serious. “He does well. He tries. He does not make things easy for himself. I believe he truly thinks mercy is to be found only in self-punishment. He’s a damned fool for it.”

Sansa nods. She turns back to the men below. 

“It’s hard work we do,” he says suddenly, breaking the silence. She jerks her head back towards him. He had not turned his attention away from her, his gaze curious as it stays trained on her. 

“You and Jon?”

“You and me.” He goes quiet, which strikes her both as fitting and wrong from him. “We lost so many and we have so little to rebuild with, you and me. You’ve done good work here, Queen,” he adds, the title tacked on clumsily.

“Sansa,” she says.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Sansa, then.”

 

 

 

 

The North is hardly receptive to a trade deal with the Free Folk. 

“The Wildlings have been our enemies for thousands of years,” Lord Overton says for, by her count, the thousandth time. “You cannot possibly expect for us to partner with them.”

“So rather than try to find peace, we should continue what? Killing each other? And to what end?” she snaps.

Her entire small council trains their eyes on her. Not for the first time, she detects distrust. Doubt. They doubt her decision.

“Your Grace, forgive me, but you did not seek our counsel when you made such a deal with Tormund Giantsbane,” Lord Royce says. “We would have advised you as we state now: such an agreement runs contrary to both our history and our nature.”

Sansa sits firm and immobile. It has been days since the Free Folk left. Days of listening to the complaints of her small council and reports of the dissatisfaction of her people. Why should they follow a leader who stands not as a bulwark against the Wildlings but elects to stand beside them? To defend herself, to defend her decision, requires her to push aside the hurt and the anger Jon left her with. She must speak of him, of Tormund, as responsible. As trustworthy. She cannot let herself portray an ounce of weakness, even if it is the only thing she feels inside of her.

“The winter is long,” Lady Dustin says. Sansa does not look to her; that, too, would betray weakness. “We need allies more than we need enemies. Queen Sansa has done well to bring us the former as opposed to the latter.”

Lady Dustin sings a different tune in private. “Do you truly believe Jon can keep his people in line? The North’s memory stretches long, and it was not too far past that these Wildlings massacred our people. We had the Night’s Watch protect us for good reason.”

“They’re Tormund’s people,” Sansa says lightly. 

“A lecherous oaf, by my accounts. Hardly boosts one’s confidence.”

Sansa looks up from the scroll spread before her on her desk. “I believe he will work with us.”

She has to believe it.

 

 

 

 

She is very tired. She retires each night to her chambers dead on her feet and wanting only quiet, solitude. She is granted neither. 

Tonight, as most nights, she finds Gendry waiting for her. Gendry, waiting to do his duty. He makes it that much worse than it need be because he is always trying to make an effort. He wants more from her than she is capable of giving. 

Instead of their usual quiet routine—he will kiss her, he will push her robe from her shoulder, he will tell her that she is beautiful and she will say nothing in reply, nothing as he bears down over top of her, as he pushes into her, spends—he kisses first her mouth and then he kisses down her body. Sansa squirms beneath him, his mouth firm against her ribcage, lower. His hands are too hot on her thighs as he separates them for his mouth.

“What are you doing?” The question comes out too high and panicked.

He looks up the length of her body to her face. “I want to make it good. For you.” He smooths his hand over her bare hip, rubbing at the scythe-like cut of bone. As if, she thinks near hysterically, much like a horse she needs gentling before riding.

It has the opposite effect on her. Her body goes rigid beneath him and a great many terrible things fill her head she might say to him. That he cares too much about the opinion of others. That he wouldn’t know how to take what is his even if it was offered, much like her body, on the finest furs and sheets. No wonder she can’t craft him into a decent King; he is weak. No wonder Arya took to the sea; he is weak. He thinks making things good is all that matters. 

If she has learned anything, she has learned that it is that those who seek goodness are not long for Westeros. 

The tension must, at least, be obvious to him. His frown deepens. “What do you like?” It’s such a preposterous question she could laugh. What does she like. He knows so little of her. She wants to tell him he’s the first man to fuck her and not try to break her, to ruin her, at the same time. She does not waste her time asking herself what she wants from a man. The scant times she has let herself wonder, when she has let her hand slip down between her legs, only one thought—one man—would come to mind. The ache that leaves her with is hardly worth the pleasure it could provide.

What she wants from a man is solely an heir. 

She tells him this, her tone biting, and he pulls back from her. “This is not for my pleasure,” she says. “It is my duty.”

Something dark shutters across Gendry’s face. “It’s too much for me to ask that you let me find a way to love you?”

Cold grips around Sansa’s heart. “Your love is not not required of you.”

Gendry is still for a long moment. When he begins to move over her he is purposeful and ungiving. Sansa pictures a cold wall behind her; she all but convinces herself she can feel it. If she closes her eyes, perhaps she could be there again. Far below Winterfell with only the dead for company. And him. She has yet to find a suitable way to punish herself for the way she thinks of him. For what she did with him down in the crypts. The memory of him comes to her unbidden—the plush give of his mouth under hers, the taste of him, the promise of his hands on her hips. She keeps her eyes open. She makes herself watch her husband. 

Despite that, she can feel her body react to his. There is a restlessness come alive inside her, making her blood burn hot and her thoughts turn more desperate. She wildly thinks that maybe this was what she wanted. Not the care and concern he wears so easily when it comes to her. She doesn’t know what to do with that much attention placed on her body. This is easier. It is easier to give into the rhythm of his hips, the way he pushes a desperate sound into her throat she tries to swallow down around. 

Later, after, in their darkened room he lays awake beside her. His breathing has not slowed into the heavy noises of sleep that sound a lot like sighs. 

In the dark, she finds it easier, too. She finds she oddly wants him to understand. “My softness must be fleeting,” she says. 

His hand curls around her upper arm, his grip firm but kind. “Not with me,” he says. 

She wishes that was true. 

 

 

 

 

Her belly finally begins to swell not long after. 

Lady Dustin is thrilled, as well as Dara and the ladies who swan about Sansa. “It will be a prince,” Beth Cassel tells her with the confidence only those who know nothing can possess.

Gendry is pleased too, at last achieving the second of two things he was brought to her bed to do: deliver her supplies from the South and deliver her an heir. 

To none of them does Sansa voice her darker thoughts. When she thinks of motherhood, she finds herself at a loss. She misses her own mother desperately. She does not know how to be one without her own there to guide her. She doesn’t even know if she wants to be a mother. She has spent the years since she first left Winterfell teaching herself to survive this world. To succeed. Neither allows for anything but the cold of her homeland. There is no place amidst the ice for anything to take root and grow. 

She can recall Cersei, more vivid to her now than she has been since her death. She remembers the Queen, the morning Sansa had her first blood. The greatest honor for a Queen was to bring princes and princesses into this world. That was what she had told her. It was the lone time Sansa saw anything as close to uncomplicated love on the woman’s face. Sansa does not feel that now. 

She thinks what she feels is dread. 

That afternoon, reports of a clash not far from Castle Black reach Winterfell. Her men versus the Free Folk. No fatalities, they say, and word is that it was provoked by Sansa’s men. The weight of that disappointment settles heavy on her shoulders. 

“Don’t make that face,” Lady Dustin tells her. “You know what the Northmen did when they sacked King’s Landing. Men are all the same when you put a sword in their hand and show them what to hate.”

If men are all the same, then by that right, should not all women be the same? Should she not feel joy as her ladies do at the prospect of a child? 

She wakes the following morning to blood. She gasps at the rush of pain. The linens beneath her are stained dark, her thighs tacky with it. She presses a hand flat to her lower abdomen and feels the answering sharp clench beneath. Inside her. Beside her Gendry sleeps on unaware. 

The pain does not cease, but is instead met with a quiet horror. She can recognize the feeling hot inside of her only as relief. It burns like wildfire in her, awful and all-consuming. She can see herself, the woman she hides not only from everyone but herself. She did not want a child. She does not wish to be a mother. Not now, not yet.

 

 

 

 

The Iron Islands are the first to mount rebellion. Dorne quickly follows suit. A formal declaration of independence is expected from both in the offing as they fight to be free of the Six Kingdoms. It is to be expected when Sansa receives messages from both Yara Greyjoy and Prince Quentyn of Dorne. Both request for Sansa, and by extension the North, to back their claims. 

Despite the heated debate of her small council, Lady Dustin is all for it. “Back them. Bring them their freedom and they will be allies.” Her mouth twists. "Give your brother two less kingdoms to rule.” Sometimes Sansa suspects there is a warmonger’s heart that beats inside the woman’s chest, that she longs for nothing more than to exact revenge for the hurts she has cradled to herself for so long. 

The desire is far from foreign to her. 

Sansa adjourns yet another late-night council meeting undecided as to her course of action. Gendry is already in their bedchamber when she shuts the door behind her. His role as King has become, unofficially, to wait for her. To wait her out. He has not touched her since she lost the baby. He looks to her as if she is fragile, made of spun glass, the same delicate constellation of ice that falls over their landscape. She does not think she wants him, but she knows she wants his pity even less.

“You’re still awake.”

“Your council ran late.”

She stills at the foot of the bed. She has his attention, but then, she always does. “What do you believe I should do?”

“You wish for my opinion?” He looks genuinely surprised. Pleased, even. 

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

There is an earnestness to Gendry she never quite knows what to with. She thinks about how much easier things could be if she was able to love him. He is stubborn, persistent. He kisses her softly each night, regardless of whether they lie together. Even now.

“You don’t think they deserve their independence?”

“I think the history is different,” she tells him. She begins to pace.

“And it’s not yours.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He shrugs, looking every bit the blacksmith that Arya had known. Every bit the King she has been trying to make him into. “Dorne, the Iron Islands—they’re not yours. You got what you wanted. Why should anyone else get it, too?”

Sansa bites down even as the corner of her jaw tics. “Are you mocking me?”

“No. I’m,” and he pauses. “There’s a risk there, isn’t it? Bran and his men decline to give them the independence they gave you, and your own gets called into question, right?”

He isn’t wrong. “So I should back Yara and I should back Quentyn to strengthen our independence?”

Gendry leans back. “Would it be so bad? Bran is King of the Four Kingdoms. You all work to keep the peace together, serving your own interests.”

“The more fractured we allow ourselves to become, the more we break the unification of the realm, the greater the risk for future violence and war.”

“Is that so?” He leans forward now, hunched, his hand clasped between his legs. “I speak from the bottom. A bastard, a commoner—“

“You were made a Lord of a Great House and then King in the North, must I remind you.”

“Aye, and I’m well aware of it. But I lived in Flea Bottom. I was no one. Where I stood all those years, lowest of the low of Westeros, I never saw a thing done for me in the capital. If the realm is to be broken down, each kingdom responsible for its own, if these kingdoms’ leadership was to focus solely on the needs of its people, I can’t imagine them going worse served.”

“You think I should back Yara and Quentyn,” she says quietly.

“I do. Yes.” He pauses. “And you do, too.”

She looks away from him and resumes her pacing. “What you speak is treason.”

“Not a word I have said would betray you, Sansa.”

“Not me. Bran.”

“Is it he I serve, or is it you? I confuse my own commitments.”

She steps over to him. She looks down at him. She cups his jaw in her hand, the day’s stubble grown in rough against her skin. 

“You serve me. You serve me well.”

 

 

 

 

She rides for Castle Black. Whatever decision she makes about the Iron Islands and Dorne, places so far-flung from the frozen North Beyond the Wall, it will affect the Free Folk. They are, she tells both herself and her small council, to be allies.

It is more than that though and she knows it. She wants to speak with Jon. She needs his advice. A part of her, the part that is still the girl who came through these very same gates to Castle Black, cold and alone and afraid, needs for him to tell her what she can do. That she can do it. It was always easier to see the clear path forward when she was trying to convince him of the need for action. Now that it is her own action required, it is so much harder. 

She wants someone to tell her that she has chosen right. 

Tormund sits down with her and Jon. The two men came to greet her together; she could hardly dismiss a King. The two of them, since Jon’s exile, have become a package deal. Always together, inseparable. The fire crackles, providing minimal warmth and light in the close quarters of Castle Black. She envies them both that ease with one another. 

“You trust these Greyjoys?” Tormund asks her after she explains her dilemma. “These people down in Dorne?”

“I don’t trust anyone.” There is a flicker across Jon’s face that looks a lot like hurt. 

“I know what I think,” Tormund says, “and it’s always in favor of kneelers learning to stand instead of bow. Let them make their land their own. Say good-bye to the cunts in the capital. Has your little brother ever been there? How do you rule a land you have never seen?”

“He can see everything,” she says, carefully. 

“Aye, but that does not make it his.”

She looks to Jon. He all but shrugs.

“You already know what you want to do,” he says. “You may not trust anyone, but you should trust yourself.”

The parlay ends there and Jon escorts her to the chamber where she will stay the night. He is silent as he walks alongside her, and Sansa finds she lacks either the strength or the words to speak.

When they reach her door, they pause.

“You leave in the morning.” It is not a question. She nods. 

“I thank you, and Tormund, for meeting with me. We need not be strangers to each other anymore, I should think.”

He smiles, his mouth pressed close, his eyes lifted to hers. 

“It was easier, before,” she says quickly. “Seeing you again,” and she stops herself. What could she possibly say? She misses him so painfully it borders on violent. “We left things poorly, and I regret it.”

“I do as well,” he says. Jon reaches for her, but then he stops himself, his hand dropped before it can touch her face. Her breath sticks in her chest. “You know, you have to know, you mean everything to me.”

“How would I know that?”

He takes her hand in his and squeezes tightly. “Trust, I suppose.”

The next morning she begins the journey back to Winterfell. They are scarcely halfway through their journey when they spy him, a rider, under Winterfell’s banner.

Her husband, the King in the North, Gendry Baratheon, the First of His Name, is dead.

 

 

 

 

They tell her there was a skirmish. Gendry had gone out with a hunting party of his own Baratheon men and they were met by the Free Folk somewhere out in the woods past Winterfell. 

“What incited such violence?” she asks, but no one has a solid answer. Instead, she has prisoners, five men of the Free Folk held in the dungeons beneath Winterfell. 

It’s not enough.

The North mourns their fallen King. Both the Baratheon men and her men want their pound of flesh in answer for their murdered King. Their anger mounts, contagious and threatening, taking root in her small council. She can all but taste the violence to come—acrid and sour. Familiar. 

Sansa waits for her own anger to rush through her, drawn from that same wellspring she works so hard to keep closed off, but there is nothing. She is numb. The loss feels as if it happened to someone else, someone she had only a passing acquaintance, and she offers this woman her sympathies. Terribly sorry for your loss, you must find a way to go on. Each night her bed is empty and she still does not sleep. If she feels anything, it is impatience. She waits now. For what, she could not say. 

_For him to come back_ , she refuses to say. 

Jon and Tormund are summoned to Winterfell in an attempt to keep the peace between their people, and to negotiate the consequences for King Gendry’s death. 

Sansa has them brought to the Great Hall. She sits the throne, her severity more stark than ever. Her hair is pulled back tight from her face and she is dressed all in black, her chain the lone piece of ornamentation other than her crown. 

Jon and Tormund enter with a small coalition of Free Folk, as well as two prisoners in shackles. “Leave us,” she says, her eyes fixed solely on Jon. Tormund does not move. She looks to him. 

“They are my men, they are my responsibility.”

“Yes,” she says. “They are.” She does not move from her throne. They will discuss this here, her power on full display. “I am urged by my small council to consider this an act of war by your people.”

Tormund braces his arms behind his back and stands tall, silent. Imposing. It is Jon who speaks.

“It was a misunderstanding, Sansa. We have no intention of waging war with the North.”

“A misunderstanding.” There are so many polite words one can use to pardon a death, she thinks, and not a single one to bring him back. “Our King is dead. And it was at the end of your man’s blade.”

“He acted alone, and on no orders of mine or Tormund’s.”

“Do you mean to tell me you lack the authority to rein your men in? To have them behave as they should? Or are they all running from the land I have given them, ready to massacre every Northman they find from The Gift to The Neck?”

“You speak to us as beggars and you wonder at our lack of respect? Wolf Queen, I’d make sure my teeth are fucking sharp enough before I speak next.” Tormund does not raise his voice, but he does not need to. Sansa sits still, as if frozen. She has never had him direct his wrath at her. She has seen it, but only ever at a distance. His face as they had sat at Castle Black and Jon read Ramsay’s letter aloud. When they met with Ramsay before battle. Lost in the melée on the field, she had seen him in small, bloodied flashes as she tried to seek out Jon in the writhing mass. 

“Of course we respect you,” Jon says hurriedly, a sharp glance cast in Tormund’s direction.

“The men who killed my husband, they are in the cells now. Have you brought me any other potential conspirators?”

“Two,” Jon says.

Seven men in total had plotted against her and against the North. “They, along with the five in our custody, will be executed.” She does not say it as an offer but as what will happen. 

Jon turns to Tormund. Tormund nods, his eyes bright and fixed on her. She is barely listening as Jon tells her they have brought supplies, and meats as well, as a gesture of partnership and goodwill to get through the winter. “It is appreciated,” she says tightly. Bartering her own husband’s death, as if there is a price that can be placed on the body of a King.

Sansa rises to her feet. She looks to Tormund. “You will perform the execution,” she tells him. She can see Jon’s confused expression out of the corner of her eye. They are Tormund’s people. The punishment, the demonstration of power and consequence, will mean more if it comes from him than any executioner at Winterfell. The King Beyond the Wall. 

“Aye,” Tormund says.

 

 

 

 

The seven men take to their knees. Tormund stands before them. The words he says carry on the wind, muddied into a wordless roar of sound. 

Sansa watches as he raises his sword. She watches as he brings it down, seven times in total. It’s not enough. As the last head drops, Sansa raises her eyes to the sky. Gray and empty, not even snow. Not even the birds. She closes her eyes. She thinks of her sister.

 

 

 

 

As King’s Landing burned, they received a raven at Winterfell. It detailed the tragedy unfolding thousands of miles away. 

Sansa had turned to Bran and she asked him, “Did you know this would happen?” He sat in his chair before the fire. Outside the window snow fell same as ashes littered what remained of King’s Landing. They had only just managed to rid Winterfell of the bone and ash that had collected here during the Long Night. Now to the South they would do the same. 

Bran took his time to answer her. For so long dark suspicion had served as her closest companion, and in that moment, the raven scroll clutched tight in her hand, she directed it at him. He looked up at her, the expression on his face opaque enough to make her want to slap him. 

“It has happened.” It was all he said. It was all that mattered.

Even now, she finds it hard not to think it—how many people died so Bran could be King of the Six Kingdoms. So she could be the Queen in the North. You traveled over miles of the dead to get this tall, to stand this high. And you never stopped. She never stopped fighting the war. 

 

 

 

 

  


	2. II.

 

 

 

“We should not have cancelled the visit,” Sansa says, yet again.

“Your Grace,” says Lady Dustin. Boredom has settled into her voice along with exhausted patience. “Your late husband’s body is still warm enough in the grave for most that the very thought of willingly allowing a clan of Wildlings through our gate would grant you little more than a riot. At best.”

A renegotiation of trading terms was planned with the Free Folk long before Gendry’s death. The small council unanimously advised its cancellation, and Sansa had conceded. Months have passed since Gendry died and in that time, relations have soured on all fronts. Sansa clings to the informal alliance she shares with the Free Folk with both hands while Bran’s court to the South sends her increasingly alarmist and hostile messages.

After Gendry’s death, Sansa ultimately made the decision to back both Yara Greyjoy and Quentyn Martell in their respective bids for independence. The decision had been made, in truth and in the back of her mind at the least, from the start. Jon wasn’t wrong—she did know what she wanted to do. She had known from the moment she saw Yara’s name scrawled along the bottom of the raven scroll, her surname striking a chord of long-aching grief within her. Maybe that was where the decision sprang from. Not solely political considerations or the health of the realm or lack thereof, but she ultimately chose out of the love and respect she still has for Theon. She scarcely knows Yara and she knows well that there is weakness to be found in decisions made when sentimentality is a factor, but she cannot imagine herself choosing differently. When she takes to the godswood to pray, a rarer and rarer occurrence, even now Theon’s name is one of the first to come to mind. She has so many to mourn, but it is always him she returns to. Not as she last saw him—cold and dead, his face not so much at peace as empty and closed. Gone. Not even as when she knew him, when he told her his name was Reek and her own name was Lady Bolton. She remembers a younger Theon, the Theon before betrayal, the one who always followed in Robb’s shadow. She tries to remember them all this way—lighter and younger and happier than the end of their days saw them. She told herself she must do right by him. 

And if she backed the Iron Islands, then she might as well back Dorne. 

“This, Your Grace, is truly the last thing we need at this time,” Lady Tallhart had said at one of their many late-night council meetings. 

“Should we ask the rest of the world to delay their conflicts and ambitions to allow us time to mourn?” The sarcasm was rich in Sansa’s mouth. She had grown used to the taste of bitterness. Her own reputation had either suffered or benefited since Gendry’s death, dependent on one’s point of view. If they thought her cold before, they saw her as hollow and chilled to the bone now. The gossip stretched through Winterfell that their Queen had not shed a single tear for her fallen husband. She could not, they said. It would freeze. 

_Fine_ , she had thought. Let them think her cold-hearted. So long as they still followed her. So long as they still called her Queen. 

And if it’s not the Free Folk who plague her thoughts, if it’s not the Iron Islands and Dorne, it’s Bran. Bran’s council has expressed its fury and betrayal to her in writing, multiple times over. They demand she recant her support. They warn her of economic consequences to be suffered should she choose to stand with rebels to the crown. They use every word of a vocabulary limited to aggression save for one: war.

The words are never Bran’s. Bran himself has remained as opaque as anything, and in his own private correspondence with her, he claims he understands her reasoning and he does not hold it against her. Sansa trusts not a single line he writes her. There is a part of her, deep down, that is unwaveringly certain that Bran ceased to be her brother the day that young Reed girl returned him to Winterfell. 

“What’s that then?” Sansa asks now. She gestures to the raven scroll Lady Dustin has unrolled. They meet more and more regularly in private now. Late into the evening, the two hole up together in Sansa’s solar. Lady Dustin drinks dark wine that stains her mouth and Sansa comes as close as she ever has to unburdening herself to another person. 

“Our familiar shadow, Tyrion Lannister. His disappointment in you grows, Your Grace.” Lady Dustin waves the raven scroll before her before letting it cast down onto the table. Tyrion Lannister, as Hand of the King, writes to them as routinely as a spurned lover. “He writes as if we have betrayed him in the most intimate ways possible.” Sansa can hear the all but suppressed glee in Lady Dustin’s voice. She enjoys this; she treats it as a game. She, Sansa knows, is dangerous, yet she treasures her confidences and counsel all the more. “And I suppose we have—leaving him with four kingdoms to command instead of six. Men with damaged pride turn into the surliest little despots.”

Sansa shrugs. “He thought I’d stand with family.”

Lady Dustin snorts indelicately. “He would.”

Now that he is the lone Lannister in a position of power, Tyrion has become the steward to the memory of his family—his brother and sister in particular. In death, Cersei is remembered as a bold and smart queen, a ruler who had the foresight to not appease the Dragon Queen. Memories of the food shortages within King’s Landing, the riots, the fear—all gone. She stood against tyrants, they say now. First, the High Sparrow, and then Daenerys. Bran lets his people say these things. The North remembers though, and so do the Iron Islands and Dorne. 

Sansa can’t imagine how Bran allows for it. Her rage lives on inside of her, for each and every thing that was ever done to her and her family. She long believed that with Cersei dead she would learn to find some peace. That she could quell the heated impulse within her that only hungered for violence. Revenge. She was wrong. She has felt nothing of peace since learning of Cersei’s death. She feels it even less with each brush of historical revision.

Sansa gestures to the scroll. “What does he write this time?”

“Oh, the usual. The collapse of the realm, appearance of betrayal by the North, how much better about it all he, and by extension, King Brandon Stark, would feel about this whole mess if you married a Lord of their choosing.”

Sansa scowls. “You’re kidding.” A peace offering under the guise of an offer of marriage. Tyrion thinks he is too clever by half.

“You’re back on the auction block, Your Grace.”

“Who is the Lord of their choice. Please, don’t tell me it’s Bronn.”

“It’s not Bronn.” Sansa doesn’t have a name for the look Lady Dustin fixes her with. She thinks it’s expectant curiosity. “Lord Robin Arryn.”

“Sweetrobin? Of the Vale?” Sansa frowns. She already has a good relationship with the Vale through Lord Royce and his continued presence in her court and his seat on her small council. She flattens the idea in her mind, tries to uncover any foul angle the proposition might possess. She finds herself lacking. If it was any other Lord, she would suspect ulterior motives. But Sweetrobin—he is as guileless as they come. She remembers him as she knew him, a sickly boy, weak in temperament as much as flesh. Greedy, she remembers that, too. She looks to Lady Dustin.

“Your confusion is shared by me, Your Grace.” She sighs. “The only thing I can imagine is that the poor boy is a spineless wretch who will make our lives a personal hell when he comes to sit beside you on the throne. We’ll have to prop him up lest he slither of his seat.”

“Kindness, Lady Dustin.”

“A wasted effort, Your Grace.”

“We will have to press Lord Royce for details. I fail how to see between the two of us we could not manage him. Lord Arryn.” Sansa glances at the second scroll at Lady Dustin’s elbow. “What’s that there?”

“Oh, that.” Lady Dustin lifts the raven scroll as if it reeks with distaste. “A report out of Volantis, of all places. Something about a red priestess of the Lord of Light.” She drops it back down with a sneer. Lady Dustin’s already thin patience consistently reaches its breaking point when met with one of two things: the maesters and their counsel, or religion. “We scarcely have time for that, what with making you a bride anew.”

Sansa ignores her. That low tide of dread within her has already begun to creep up at the prospect of yet another marriage. She can feel it trying to smother her in her breast. “We shall speak with Lord Royce.” She pauses. She bites at her bottom lip. “We should not have canceled the visit.”

“Oh, Your Grace. What need we have of so many enemies when it’s you who is willing to unmake the house you live in, brick by bloody brick?”

 

 

 

 

“A love thwarted is a wound that never heals. It is the briar, buried so deep beneath the skin that to pull it out would threaten bodily ruin,” Lady Dustin said to her one night. The glass of wine at her elbow was empty, her mouth dark with it, an animal after the hunt and the feast. The two of them were alone and no one was there to bear witness but each other. Sansa did not think she had said anything to merit such an insight from Lady Dustin, but then Lady Dustin’s mind was as sharp as her tongue. Very little escaped her notice. She saw her, but she also didn’t. She projected herself onto Sansa, wanted to give her all her old hurts and slights. Sansa knew this, and yet what Lady Dustin was determined to see was never that far off the mark. 

Lady Dustin sighed and she reached for the decanter of wine; just as quickly, she thought better of it and returned her attention to Sansa. “This is a world that takes much from us and gives us very little in return. What we find, be it good or otherwise, we must hold fast to. But you know that already, don’t you? I see it in you. You will protect what is yours and not fear the cost. The North, your crown. Your brother.”

The fire crackled behind her. Sansa thought of licking flame, heat. Ash, bone, dust. She frowned.

“Did you know,” Lady Dustin said, the words slow, "I was meant to wed first your uncle and then your father? Neither obviously took, yet here I am. Winterfell, with the last of the Starks. The Hand of the Queen in the North.”

“And I am Queen.”

“Yes. And what of the cost?  Tell me, are you still paying it, Your Grace? ”

 

 

 

 

She agrees to marry Lord Robin Arryn in a last ditch bid to keep the peace with the realm. He does not come to Winterfell until the wedding itself. He arrives two days before the ceremony is to take place. 

“You look different,” are his first words to her. “Older.”

“Yes,” she says. “As do you, Lord Arryn.”

And he does. He has grown into himself, as most men do as formerly awkward boys. He is tall and he wears his leanness with a forced grace, an attempt to disguise his own unease that lends him the air of a man walking aboard the deck of a ship without his sea legs. If he was a crueler man, the expression on his face could be described as snide. Instead, he is petulant and bored, desperate for if not respect then approval. Unfortunately, she thinks, they share the last in common. 

They speak little in the intervening days until the wedding. His people and her ladies handle the planning of it on her behalf, far more spectacle than her wedding to Gendry had. The wedding this time is all pomp and needless wealth, expenditures spent by the Vale and not the North. Lord Arryn, she learns, has a taste for the finer things. They bring trunk after trunk of his belongings into Winterfell and she feels something possessive stir within her. She sets her teeth and does not say anything—not yet. 

But it is odd to have him here at Winterfell now. Their marriage until his retinue pulled through the gates has been handled at a remove: messages exchanged between the Eyrie and Winterfell, each exchange business-like and coy, as if both parties were holding out on the other for the better deal. 

“If I do this,” Sansa said, “I want to solidify relations with the Free Folk.” This was after. After she and Lady Dustin had approached Lord Royce, after he lit up at the prospect of Lord Arryn marrying her, becoming the King in the North. Before she told Tyrion she would accept his proposal for peace. “He will not disappoint,” Lord Royce had said. Sansa knew this was not a thing one man could guarantee about another, let alone himself, but she thanked him all the same. It was only with Lady Dustin she showed a glimpse of her true self—ambitions and intentions, doubts but never fear.

“Your Grace. Everything to you is a negotiation.” Sansa did not miss the pride with which Lady Dustin spoke. “And what might solidifying such a relationship look like to you? A blood oath? We spit in our hands and shake? Regicide, perhaps?”

It is inviting the Free Folk to the wedding.

 

 

 

 

As invited, the Free Folk come. 

The wedding proves to be a miserable, stolid event Sansa has to force herself through. Robin prays to the Seven and the ceremony is twice as long in the godswood as they honor the Old Gods and the New.

Once they are inside the Great Hall, Robin’s face turns down as he looks out at their assembly. “They told me you had a fondness for Wildlings,” he says. Robin is not the only one perturbed by their presence here. She has caught the disgruntled glances aimed at them by her own Northmen as much as by the men of the Vale. There is a current of violence in the air. She finds herself wishing for it to materialize, for a man to pick up a blade and break this smothering tension. Finally make it happen and all his effort for naught: there will be no peace. 

“The Free Folk are not only our neighbors, but our allies. You will do well to treat them with respect.” She turns to him and smiles, dimming the sting of her words. She turns back to the Hall before her. “And speaking of.”

Jon and Tormund cut through the gathered crowd as they step forward to the head banquet table. Sansa has not had a moment alone with Jon, not since she was at Castle Black. While he is quiet, subdued as ever, there is a forthrightness to him. He looks to her; he makes it plain that she is the only one who will earn his attention. He makes her skin prickle beneath her heavy dress. Her dress is yet another concession she made for this union—Robin had vast opinions on what she should wear; in the end, she let him and Beth Cassel hash out the details. She let them dress her. Very little of her was a part of the ceremony or is a part of this reception. A necessity, she tells herself yet again, for her to get what she wants. She appeases Tyrion, she appeases Bran’s small council. She keeps Robin happy enough. She can then do as she wishes. Her gaze flits to Jon. As she needs, she silently amends.

Her herald calls out their names as they approach the dais. “The King Beyond the Wall Tormund Giantsbane, and Jon Snow.”

Robin blanches as he looks at Tormund. 

“We thank you for joining us today,” Sansa says. Tormund rests his weight on the banquet table between them and leans across it towards her. 

“I believe I am supposed to tell you the Free Folk are here as a gesture of goodwill and future cooperation, that these are my respects I pay, or some fucking thing like that.” He shrugs. “Your brother wrote my lines. He’d perform them better.”

“You do well enough,” she says. “I will let you stay and eat and drink.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “I’ve never been to a Southron wedding before. Are they all that fucking long?” Sansa says nothing, but she can feel her mouth twist as she tries not to grin. He leans in even closer, his voice pitched low, only for her. “Is it so you can change your mind?”

“It’s tradition,” she says. “Have you met our King in the North?”

He glances to Robin, and then turns his attention back to her. “This King is even smaller than the last,” he says. His eyes are bright and he smiles wide. She knows precisely what he means. While Robin is tall, taller even than she is, he is thin, no muscle to him. No fight—save, most like, for the occasional tantrum, she thinks ruefully. 

“I look forward to you getting to know him.” The current of violence is not only present amongst her guests, but inside her too. Dark enough and threaded through her, when she pictures Tormund acquainted with Robin all she can see is bloodshed. Her new husband’s, Tormund’s hands wet with it. She swallows quickly, dismisses the thought, same as anything else she wants but cannot have. She looks past Tormund to Jon. “And you as well.” 

“Your Grace.” It is all Jon says. She watches him, waits for him to do more, but he disappoints. With a nod he is gone, reentering the noisy fray.

Beside her, she hears Robin turn to his man and say, “That's the one that killed the Dragon Queen?” Her eyes follow Jon through the crowd until he exits, walking most likely through Winterfell as if he belongs here, she thinks. He still belongs here. “I thought he was exiled,” Robin says. She suppresses a snort. They all are, in one way or another, aren’t they? Jon exiled beyond the wall, Arya exiled to whichever corner of the world she has found to make her home or die in. Robin, exiled to the North to be her husband. And Sansa. She reaches for the goblet before her but she does not take a sip. She is here, and she is not. She looks out over the crowd, but Jon is gone. She is alone. She is always alone.

 

 

 

 

“Should you be here? With me?”

She manages to catch Jon alone during the feast. Before the bedding. She draws him into her solar, painfully aware of the guards who line the hall, who watch her close. She shuts the door and faces Jon.

Worry creases his face. “What is it?”

Her relationship with Jon is now bounded by starts and stops, his infrequent appearances at her court and the lone time she traveled north to Castle Black. There is always that look to him as if he is fearful of what he might find each time he sees her. She herself can see the change in him; she can only imagine what he sees in her.

“I wanted to see you.”

His frown deepens. He looks down at the floor, at his boots, instead of at her. He lifts his eyes carefully. “You should return to your guests.”

Sansa flushes. Pinpricks of anger break painfully through the numbness of not just the day but the past several months. It hurts, but it feels good. It reminds her of who she is. She is a Queen. Things do not happen to her—she makes them happen.

She lunges forward. She behaves as heedless and foolish as she ever has and she blames him for it. She presses her mouth to his. His mouth yields to hers near immediately, as open and hungry as herself, but that is impossible. No one is as hungry as her. He lets her taste him, even if it is against his own better judgment, before she feels him leave her. He is always leaving; she wants a story where someone stays. 

Jon stills her with a strong hand on her shoulder. He grips her tight enough to leave a mark, she thinks. She hopes. She tries to picture Robin Arryn, King in the North, Sweetrobin with his big, wide-open eyes pulling her dress from her body only to find another man has been there first.

“Are you out of your mind?” Jon breathes, the words low and lethal.

“Jon, please,” she says. Her unhappiness has reached its tipping point within her. It threatens to flood and escape. Her eyes feel wet and full and she blinks quickly.

His grip gentles and she rues its loss even before he pulls away from her.

“I can’t,” he whispers. “You’re wed. Honor forbids it.”

Sansa takes a step back from him, an angry breath forced from her. Her nostrils flare. This is easier, she tells herself. Anger is better. “Honor,” she says, “took our father’s head.”

“Do not speak of him as you beg me to fuck you,” he spits out. Sansa freezes, her cheeks warm. It’s not just at the vulgarity of it, but that it is finally in the open. He knows what she wants of him. He can say it out loud. Jon has the grace to look abashed near immediately. His temper like dragon flame—gone just as quick as it arrived. That’s not what she wants from him—more of the same. More shame and more self-imposed disgrace. She wants the fire to continue to burn.

“You paint quite the portrait of me,” she says.

Jon clasps his hands behind his back, tightly reined control evident in the lines of his shoulders, the tension in his jaw. 

“You wish to bring your father into this? Fine. He’d have my head if he knew I wanted—” He stops himself abruptly.

“Knew what?” Her voice is placid and still as a sheet of ice. As treacherous, she knows. She wants him to say it. She wants to hear it too, out loud. Specifically what he would lose his head for wanting from her. Even if he refuses her again, now, in this room, as she stands before him clad in the dress her husband selected she wear to take her as his wife, to take off of his wife, she will have something to cradle hot and dangerous in her breast. 

Jon shakes his head. He won’t say it. She wants to tell him he has come back from worse things than this, death included, but disappointment has filled her mouth like ashes.

“Your father and your lady mother—”

“They’re dead,” she snaps. “They all are dead. We are all that is left.” She waits until he meets her eye. “There is no one left but you. There is no one left to judge us.”

“There’s me.”

“And you judge me then? For what I want?”

“I judge myself.”

Jon approaches her and her heart beats fast and violent. He takes her into his arms as if she is delicate, and perhaps she is. He holds her still. She wants him to stay. She wants it so viscerally, it is an animal awoken in her, all teeth and hunger. Stay with me. Make this easier. Nothing will ever be simple between them; she knows this. It never has been, but she wants. Stay. She trusts herself best when he is at her side. 

He kisses her on the forehead and then he leaves.

 

 

 

 

Sansa meets Robin in their bedchamber that night. She lies beneath her husband and she shuts her eyes to the stretch of his body over hers. She endures his touch on her, his hands tentative, nothing bold about him. He may take what he wants but only when placed on a silver platter first. He will not work for it. Fine; she spreads her legs. He is mercifully quick with her—quiet. 

She lies still beside him as his breath evens out into sleep. She misses Gendry, she finds with a start. She closes her eyes less they finally start to fill with tears. She misses her husband. She misses Jon. Arya. Mother, Father, Robb, Rickon. Bran. If she let herself, she thinks she would find she misses the entire world. She misses when there was something in it for her, something to hold fast to other than land and a crown. It is lonely here in the North, lonely in this bed. Emotion catches in her throat and she hastily covers her mouth as her new husband sleeps soundly beside her.

 

 

 

 

The marriage is a mistake from the start. Robin is a terrible husband, and she is a terrible wife to him. Snappish and impatient, she finds him lacking. All of that can be forgiven, she thinks. What cannot be is that he is a terrible king. Weak-willed and petty, unfocused, each and every foul emotion shows plain on his slack, handsome face. For better and worse, he is much as Sansa remembers him as a child. That is, to say, a disappointment.

“He is a gormless excuse for a boy who lacks the confidence to believe himself a man,” Lady Dustin says to her one night. “And now he is our King.”

“It could be worse,” Sansa says softly.

“It could be better.”

Sansa waves her off. “He is lazy and spoiled, but he is sweet enough and malleable in his own way. It could be much worse.”

He rarely takes her to bed, as if he expects her to take up the initiative if it is an heir she wants. In the months since the wedding they have slept together only a handful of times. Each time is under the cover of night and the weight of the furs on their bed. He is repetitive and halting, his hips bony against her own. She lays there, still, and lets him try to work out what he must do to her. He is clumsy and scarcely forceful and she does not think either of them find enjoyment in the act. 

Her discord with her new husband is mirrored by the increasing conflict of the realm.

Relations continue to worsen with the Free Folk while Bran has undertaken his own efforts to keep Dorne and the Iron Islands in the Six Kingdoms. He has levied sanctions and tariffs against both and Sansa has received her own increasingly militant raven scrolls from his council that threaten the same. The threat of war has returned to the air; it’s enough to make her sick. 

Sweetrobin rarely sits in on her small council meetings. She invited him originally in the hope that she could mold him into a sharper political mind. That the simple problem with Sweetrobin is that he can achieve nothing without being coddled first. Sansa lacks the patience to treat him as if he is her own child, but she figured including him in the workings of the North she could teach him how to lead. So far, he has proven her woefully wrong. Despite that, she heeds her ladies’ advice. She will shape him into a good king. It does not matter if he is a good husband to her; she needs him to be good for her people, not herself. 

And her ladies do advise her. The discord of her marriage must be humiliatingly apparent to anyone who bothers to look. Each time she is alone with her ladies, be it in her private solar, in her bed chamber late at night, over breakfast, they race forward, unsolicited, with generic wisdom.

“Give him direction,” Lady Dustin said. “We’ll pray to the gods we won’t need to provide him a compass, too.”

“Give him love,” Dara said, her fingers sunk in Sansa’s hair, soft against her scalp. “A man, even a king, will obey love.”

“Flatter him,” Beth said. She picked at the morsels brought to them with the tea. She scowled and set it back down on the platter. With the new sanctions and tariffs imposed by Bran, fresh fruits were the first to go missed. “No man can resist a stroked ego,” she said.

“I am his Queen,” Sansa said. “That should be more than enough for him.”

“For men,” Wylla said drily, “there is no such thing as enough.”

It’s not only for men. Sansa can feel that deep within herself, a landscape without edge or horizon. As if inside of her is a space that stretches even beyond herself and there will never be enough to fill her. 

Her husband sits at the small council table now, abjectly bored and slumped over to his side. His fingers drum without rhythm on the table. Lord Royce wears an expression of both disappointment and shame. Sansa ignores him. She is besieged on all fronts; she need not add her husband to the pressure she already endures. 

“The Four Kingdoms will not act against us,” Lady Tallhart says with a confidence Sansa does not think any of them have earned. “Their economy could not bear it.

“I think, my lady, you mean our economy could not bear it,” Lord Blackwood says archly. 

“He cannot tax the rebels into submission, not without paying the price himself,” Lady Tallhart again.

“I think we are all well aware there is blessed little a soul can do to beat a Greyjoy into submission,” Lady Dustin says. 

“The Iron Islands is a miserable place,” Robin says suddenly. All heads turn to him. “What do you care what comes of it? Let it sink into the ocean for all I care.” He manages to slump that much lower into his chair. “Are we almost done?”

 

 

 

 

It is not until months later that Jon returns to Winterfell, with Tormund, for their long postponed meeting. It will be, she knows, as much a negotiation for a peace treaty as it will be a revisit to their already established trade terms. 

“Will you sit in on the deliberations?” Sansa asks Robin. Jon and Tormund arrived the night before, snow sticking wet to their shoulders and hair and exposed skin of their faces. She spent days waiting for this; she wants to believe that what she felt when they entered the Great Hall was simple relief, uncomplicated by anything worse. 

Robin looks at her blankly before his face animates. “Do you know of the history of falconry in the Seven Kingdoms? It’s extensive, I’m told. Your Maester promised me a volume from the Citadel. And, well, a bird.”

“Excuse me?”

“Falconry.” It’s all he says before he resumes dressing for the day. 

So it is without her husband, the King in the North, that she enters her own small council chambers and takes her seat.

They arrive not long after—Tormund and Jon and a couple men of the Free Folk she does not know by name as well as one woman. The woman is stout with still hands and a mouth like a carved slash across her frowning face. She does not take a seat. Instead, she remains standing, directly behind Tormund’s chair, as if she expects as much an ambush as she does hours of tedious discussion. Perhaps, Sansa thinks with a flutter of curious distraction, she is their Queen. Tormund pays her no mind and the other men of the Free Folk, including Jon, afford her distance rather than deference, so perhaps not. 

Lady Dustin stands. She begins to speak, brings the meeting to a start. Sansa stays quiet at first, watchful. She wants to be careful; she does not want any surprises. Her eyes slowly drift around the table, taking in the expression of each man and woman who sits at her table. She pays closest attention to Tormund. This is hardly the first time they have sat in this room, sat on either sides of the same table, the same issue, but she wants to make him predictable to her. She wants to know what he will do before he does it. Before he knows. Successful leadership and successful deal-making requires the ability to accurately predict another man’s behavior. She is well-versed in this lesson. 

Tormund, she knows, is blunt, to the point, and categorically uninterested in any sense of pageantry or politics. He does not get on well with her small council, who, in fairness, are largely opposed to both him and these meetings with him. Half of her people in this room all but cower from him while the other half look on with barely disguised disdain. They are humoring her. They have no actual desire for peace, not with him. It is yet another battle she will have to fight uphill.

Sansa knows that it is hard enough to change one single person’s thoughts to match her own, but to have to change, to bring around all of the North to her side—it feels near impossible. To convince them the Free Folk can be allies instead of enemies—she does not know how a leader is meant to change hearts and minds without the threat of bloodshed. Lord Baelish taught her how to slide the blade into a man’s back without him even noticing, after he has done his bidding, and Cersei taught her the golden rule and threat of tyranny. And Daenerys, so close, had failed. 

She looks to Jon across the table. He did it first, she tells herself. He brought the Free Folk and the North together to first defeat the Boltons and then the Night King. Is it that simple? Is that she is merely the wrong ruler to promote unity? A woman instead of a man, untested by battle in the conventional sense. Is that the only way one can earn respect? 

Another darker thought begins to crowd the back of her mind. Unity had only been possible under a cloud of war. They need a common enemy. 

Jon interrupts her thoughts. Seated across from her, he looks directly at her. Last they spoke was at her wedding, and she still carries that sting of rejection and embarrassment. She has nursed both into a blooming resentment rather than healed. 

“Compromise must be the goal of this summit, Your Grace,” he says. "You cannot cling so fast to stubborn ideals.”

What does he know of her ideals. “If I do not cling tight I risk it will all slip away,” she says, each word bitten off and cold. Jon’s face goes soft while Tormund watches her impassively. She takes a deep breath to marshal her temper. “I find men often employ the concept of compromise when they wish an opposing party give what they want. In this compromise scheme you speak of, what shall you give me? You’ve yet to give me peace. You’ve yet to stop your men from raiding the villages and farmsteads your people deem to be too far north. Do you ransom my people? Your compromise is to end the violence but only if you receive what you want from me?”

“I am told,” Tormund says, “that such a thing is called negotiating.”

“Stop the violence. And then we will talk.”

 

 

 

 

The small council adjourns for the evening. No progress has been made; they are in the same place they had started. 

A small feast is held in the Hall and Sansa excuses herself. Among other things, she is tired. Her intention is to slip off to her solar, alone. She wants the time ill-afforded to her to sit and think alone. She waves off her ladies, her guards, as she stands. It is so difficult to find time alone. It has been the case since she first sat the throne. Her steps are dogged by if not guards then her ladies and often both. 

She pauses, en route. Noises down an adjacent and empty corridor catch her attention. It dawns on her as she glances around the corner what she is hearing just as quickly as they come into view. 

The sight lands with a thud in her gut. 

She can scarcely see the woman’s face. Her hands are braced against the wall and her arm blocks her at an angle as Sansa peers around the wall. She is one of Winterfell’s maid, she can tell as much by her dress. Even if her skirts are hiked up around her hips. 

Tormund is behind her. A wide hand clutches at her between her legs as he moves against and into her, his other hand gripping at the nape of her neck. Sansa catches a glance of the woman’s face, as she moves into his grip. Her face is slack, a vacant look of bliss dropping her mouth open and her eyes shut. Tormund’s is the opposite: his brow is furrowed with determination, his mouth clenched and teeth bared with the effort, with sheer and total want. He grunts with each thrust of his hips forward and the maid answers, breathy, in kind. Sansa feels embarrassed, flustered, her face hot as something ugly coils and clutches greedily inside of her. 

When Tormund lifts his head, when he begins to turn in her direction, she steps away. She walks away quickly, a hand held to her throat.

She does not think any no man has ever looked at her like that. Taken her like that. She will not let herself remember Ramsay and she would not let Gendry want her like that. Above her in bed later that night, Robin labors to give her an heir. She can’t help but picture in her head what she saw. It’s far too easy to swap out the maid for herself. She shifts her hips as Robin ruts into her. A gasp sticks in her throat as the man she imagines fucking her is replaced by another.

 

 

 

 

After another day of drawn-out negotiations, marginally more successful than the last, the map of the North spread out on the table and picked at like the last slice of pie, Sansa is finally alone with Jon. 

She goes to his rooms, carefully poised, no hurry to her steps despite the flutter of anxiety in her chest. Her guards are smart enough not to look too closely at her. They let her pass. Earlier that evening, as she departed the small council Jon had asked her to visit his chamber. “If it suits,” he added, as if lack of propriety was their only potential issue.

She knocks gently on his door. She glances to the guard at the end of the hall; he keeps his gaze fixed forward. 

Jon opens the door. “You came alone,” he says. Sansa does not allow herself to frown, but she wonders if she misunderstood him. “Good,” he says softly and he steps back from the door. No, she thinks as she crosses the threshold, as he closes the door behind her—she understood perfectly. 

Sansa considers the small room they have housed him in for the duration of the summit. Jon, returned, under the roof of Winterfell. A guest. 

“I trust you are finding your stay here comfortable?” Jon starts at her formality. He never did learn how best to hide his emotions and they crash over his face with ease. 

“Yes, Your Grace.”

She clasps her hands before her and straightens her posture. “I am pleased.” She remembers when she first came to Castle Black, after fleeing Ramsay. So much time and so much had passed since she had seen him last. But even then, he held her, he looked at her with a fondness she did not think she deserved. They were strangers to each other, and yet she felt as if she did not know another better. What happened to that, she wants to know. She thinks of the last time she saw him, their words exchanged achingly personal. She thinks of the burnt stench of King’s Landing as he embraced her and she was certain it was for the final time. 

Across the room, Jon is speaking of the earlier negotiations. “I think by now you know, but you will find Tormund is as unbending as yourself,” Jon tells her. 

“I cannot decide which of us you underestimate and who you overestimate,” she says. This is easier; teasing is bright in her voice and Jon offers her a small sad smile. As if he were to squint he might be able to see and believe they were back in the past. There was little that was simple or easy back then, but compared to now, she envies their former selves. Her face is still fond when she says, “I did not come here to speak of him.”

“What did you come here for?”

She does not answer him. Her loneliness beats as if its own separate heartbeat inside of her. She steps over to where Jon has his furs laid out over a chair to dry by the fire. Her fingers drag lightly over them. “It’s still odd for me, you know. Hearing you refer to me as ‘Your Grace.’” It should be impersonal, coming from him. Anything other than her name in his mouth should strike her as such, but instead, each time he says it, each time in front of his men and in front of hers, she finds it uncomfortably intimate. It is not, she thinks, the way a man would address a Queen above him but rather a lover in his bed. 

“It is your title,” he says, lost. “What else am I to call you in front of the others?”

“You like it, don’t you?” she says. The heat from the fire leaves her feeling over-warm and flushed. She feels as if she has found a loose thread within him and the more she pulls the more he will unravel for her. She will see him for what he truly is, not solely for what she has long wished to see in him. You cannot be a stranger to each other when you have bared all to be seen and understood. “Bending the knee.”

She sees him startle out of the corner of her eye. That slack mouth of his, parted open in a question he does not know to even begin to ask her. He had looked the same at her when she accused him of bending the knee to Daenerys out of love. Caught out, afraid for it. Unable to deny.

Sansa does not permit herself to look up as she hears him approach. She keeps her eyes trained but unfocused on her pale hand, spread out against his dark furs. She listens to the drag of his boots over the stone floor, the patient and steady draw of his breath. 

Jon draws his fingers down the back of her hand before he takes to his knees. He clutches her hand and she finds herself gripping his in kind. She finally looks down at his face. There is an animal quality to it, anticipatory, his dark eyes gleaming and his mouth wet. 

“Not for just anyone,” he says.

“For me?”

He dips his head. He brings her hand to his mouth and he kisses it, less out of tribute and more out of devotion, desire. Things worse than she has ever let her limited imagination bring to her late at night.

“For you.”

She curls her fingers in his hair and she pulls him closer. He goes, leaning into her too-tight grasp. He drops her hand and he wraps his arms around her hips, his face buried at her waist. She holds him there. For the first time in a long time, she thinks that what she wants is very close at reach. She fears the obvious: to have it so near at hand only makes it less likely of happening. But Jon’s hands are on her now, the weight of them pressing into her, the memory something real she will be able to return to and say, yes, this happened. Yes, he held me. Yes, he wanted me as I was. He wanted me as I want him. 

“Get up,” she says. 

Jon is still against her for a moment. Not disobedient, but hesitant. She feels him breathe in deep against her before he rises. His hands are still on her; she wants more. 

Jon is the one to kiss her, open-mouthed and hungry. He closes his eyes and he cups her cheek and when he breathes against her mouth she believes it is the start of her name. 

“And what of your honor?” Her mouth slicks against his as she asks, mockery laced through the question and the obvious want in her voice and her mouth and her hands. They clutch at his shoulders, ready to hold him to her should he try to pull away.

“Don’t,” he hisses. He gathers her hair in a fist and pulls her face back down to his. Her scalp stings and the sound she makes is broken and needful. She can feel something unnameable tug and pull between them. The entirety of their history unspools as he touches her.

Honor, she wants to tell him as he licks into her mouth, is as arbitrary as anything else. It is what you can live with. It’s what they make you have to live with. He presses the width of his thigh between her legs and her hips buck instinctively against him. There is very little honor to be found in most things they do. Honor is the same as a crown. They invented it for you and then they gave it to you. It is as real as you make it.

I can choose to give myself to you, she does not say. Instead her fingers curl against his chest and work the plackets of his coat open. She can feel the warmth of his chest waiting beneath his clothes and she wants at that. She wants at him; if she could find her way beneath the flesh and the bone and ensure herself a part of him she would. 

She has never taken the time to trace what she feels for Jon to its source. To seek out that wellspring that flows within her despite any attempts to tamp it, to freeze it. It is not cowardice, she has told herself, but survival. It is a terrible thing to want and to love someone you cannot have. To doubt they could ever feel the same. She shares her loneliness with him, each hurt she wants to drop at his feet, each small bit of affection, every little thing she has nurtured for him since they took back Winterfell all those years ago.

Jon’s hands shake as they work over her dress. The chain of her necklace clacks noisily as he pulls at the heavy fabric. His fingers are thick and clumsy with her lacings. She offers no assistance. She traces the bottom curve of his mouth with her tongue. She keeps her eyes open. She buries her face beneath the hinge of the jaw and breathes in deeply as her dress finally slips heavily from her shoulders. 

This is what it feels like for a man to want you, she thinks. In her smallclothes, his hand rests at her collarbone. His hands are hot against her skin and he traces down over the silhouette of her body. It’s not enough. 

Together they stumble over to the bed. He pushes her back onto it and she goes easily. She is breathing fast and loud now, a different sort of fear than she is used to in a man’s bed. It’s not fear, she thinks, as Jon drags his hand up her leg, his grip hot behind her knee. It’s anticipation. 

Jon draws her smallclothes down her legs and she watches him. He runs the flat of his hand over her scarred thigh and a look of deep sadness and reverent penitence twists his face. As if this is one more wrong thing for him to make up to her. She could tell him she had thought of him as the wound had healed. Ramsay had told her that Jon was the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. She knew he was alive, both close enough and too far away, so she took her pain, and curled alone in her bed, inside their home, she gave it to him. 

She will not tell him these things. There is little to nothing to be earned from it. She opens her legs for him instead and he is worshipful of her now, with his hands and with his mouth. He takes her hips and he holds tight, the width of his shoulders pushing her legs apart wider as he fits his mouth between her legs. He is noisier even than she is, each falling groan and pleading sound he makes, wet against her cunt. It’s too much and it’s not enough. She wants him inside her, she wants him physically there, within her, after already occupying her for so long. Her body shakes with the effort of riding out what he gives her until she finally feels it break over her, through her, as her legs tighten around him and her eyes squeeze shut.  “That’s it,” he says, his voice as filthy as his words. “Come for me.”

After, Jon kisses up her body, his beard rough against her breasts. He helps her undress him. Jon has his own scars. They cut into his chest, deep and personal and fatal. She traces the sharp edge of one only for Jon to grip tight around her wrist and still her hand. They have never spoken to each other of all that had been done to them in each other’s absence. He died. They killed him. She knows the traitors were punished, hanged, but he has never told her the rest. Did he want to come back? Did he find any peace in death? Was this world that much worse a place to return to after having left it? Was he afraid? Was he angry? She wants to know if there is someone, anyone, in this world who is as angry as she is. She likes to think he would be the one to understand it. Understand her.

When he pushes into her he will not stop saying her name. She aches as her body yields around him, and when she arches her back, Jon groans. He gives himself over to her. Their coupling is quick, laced with everything unspoken between there. There is never enough time, not for them, so all she does is say his name too, pray that he knows her as she wants him to, understands her enough to know that there are a great many things she wishes she had the time and the courage to say to him. His body goes rigid above hers and she clings to him as he spills into her, even as he begins to pull away. She does not move. He is a wound she does not think will ever heal within her.

 

 

 

 

They are granted three days. The summit marches forward and each night she comes to him. She relies on Robin’s oblivious nature not to question her absence at night. He has been asleep each night she has returned to her chambers. The first morning she made an offhand comment, referencing Lady Dustin—who Robin fears more than The Stranger and the Unsullied and even Sansa herself—and the late night spent preparing for the morning’s deliberations. Robin said nothing, and then, once he stood, “I will be in the mews.”

“Bird-brained,” Lady Dustin said when she asked after Robin’s whereabouts. “The Boy King makes it too easy to mock.”

Across the table, Jon would not look at her. 

At night, it was different. They furtively learned each other and committed it to memory. She felt her body relax under his, she let herself both understand and crave pleasure. And each night she left him, quickly and quietly, and waited for shame to find it. It did not. Instead she was met by something far more familiar: anger. 

She stews in it now, as she rises to dress. “We leave in two days’ time,” Jon says behind her, sleepy. Sated and still naked in his bed. Cold snaps within her. He will leave her, and it will be as if this never happened. The brevity of it, of him, is not fair.

As always, Sansa wants more. 

“You could stay,” she hears herself say. She looks over her shoulder at him. “You could come home.”

Jon looks at her as if he means to say something that would end her. _This is not my home. I have built myself a new home_. She can’t bear it. If he says it, she’s not sure what she might do.

“Don’t,” she says before he can open his mouth. Sharp, a command. She holds up a hand. He obeys her. 

She resumes dressing. “At the very least you can end your exile. I am Queen, I can offer you clemency. You can stop skulking about like a fugitive, grant yourself greater freedom to visit.” An idea occurs to her. She turns back to face him. “You can be Tormund’s envoy at my court. To facilitate our new agreement, you will stay.”

“Sansa.” He shakes his head as he sits up. “I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it.”

“Which? Clemency or Winterfell? Me?” She hurriedly and loosely laces her dress along her side, her fingers shaking with humiliation and rage. “So you think this is a sufficient punishment then? You wallow, Jon. You live Beyond the Wall and absolve yourself of the responsibility of being a part of the world you helped break. It’s selfish.”

“Oh, because it’s not what you want?” he snaps. Anger has filled his own face, a bright flushed red. 

“What I want has never factored into what you do—why should I expect it to start now?”

“You wanted an independent North! And, look! What is it that you have?”

She grinds her teeth. “You give me far too much credit, Jon. The fate of Queens and the realm and the North’s independence, all because of me. I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be.”

She can still feel where he was inside of her. She aches between her legs. Her skin feels chilled without his touch.

“Why did you even come here? Why did you let me—” and she stops. A part of her, the wiser part, the part that has learned the worst lessons this world and the men in it have to offer her, has no need for his reply. 

Jon still looks at her with open and abject hurt. Sansa swipes quickly beneath her eye before the tears can spill over. 

“Because this is all I can give you,” he says.

 

 

 

 

They hold a feast for the departing Free Folk the following night. The crowd is lively and bright, a raucous and a near friendly energy filling the Great Hall. The negotiations have ended, albeit on an open-ended note. Tormund and his men are to return to renegotiate the terms of settlements along the border and land ownership so long as both sides maintain the peace. The peace, they spoke of it over the course of this week like a fabled beast they both hunted in the dark. No one knew how to catch it and presumed the only way to corner it and call it their own was through bloodlust. At least that was where they landed: any instigated violence, on either side, is to be punishable by death. 

It’s not the agreement that has both of their men reaching for tankards of ale and singing along with the musicians: it is the belief that the winter may be waning, earlier than thought. The weather has warmed in the days the Free Folk have spent at Winterfell and the Maesters are all abuzz about the prospect of spring.

Sansa gave a brief speech to the gathered men before the food was served. She was proud, she said, to announce a cessation of hostilities. She did not let herself look to Jon as she spoke. She could not. She promised them all a better future than the past they had lived. As she sat, she thought: Peace is so much more work to call for than war.

Now, the musicians strike up a familiar tune, an old favorite of hers. “Jenny of Oldstones.” She finally allows her gaze drifts across the Hall to where Jon is seated with his men. They have spoken little since their last night together. She has nothing to say; hurt is still lodged too tight in her throat to permit her to speak to him.

She knows that she will say farewell to him, yet again, in the morning. He is always leaving her and she is always saying her farewells. In the coming weeks, when her belly begins to swell, she will think only of this night. Not the hurried and captured ones spent together alone in his chambers, but this night. As she sits there, alone and slightly lost, her gaze unfocused as she listens to the music. It’s not that he cannot stay, she thinks to herself, but that he won’t.

 

 

 

 

Sansa gives birth to a daughter in a snow storm. The winter has returned to them with a vengeance. The wind howls outside the walls of Winterfell, as squalls of snow and ice mercilessly envelope them. It is a terrible night. “A bad omen,” the Maester says with quiet worry.

“Nonsense,” Lady Dustin says. “The child will be a force of nature.”

 

 

 

 

Months later, once the snow first stops and then is cleared, festivities are held at Winterfell to honor Princess Lyanna, heir to the North. The baby has dark hair and a serious face and there is no question in Sansa’s mind as to who the father is. 

Gifts arrive for the Princess from all corners of the continent, including the Free Folk. Jon, Tormund, and a small band of Tormund’s men arrive in a gesture of goodwill for the North and its future. Sansa watches them, seated on her throne. She holds Lyanna in her arms as Jon looks upon her. The color drains from his face and when he lifts his eyes to meet Sansa’s own she is met by quiet desolation. Sansa offers him nothing back, her own face calm and icy.

“Your presence today is much appreciated,” she says to the Free Folk. She fixes her attention on Tormund, finding it far easier to speak to him than Jon. “Our daughter will be raised in a North that recognizes peace and cooperation with the Free Folk, and for that I thank you.” They are the words of a Queen, diplomatic and impersonal, and Jon looks at her as if he cannot recognize her. 

Once they have left the Hall, she hands Lyanna off to the wet nurse hovering beside the throne. “Take her,” she says, her voice tight. 

Sansa retreats to her solar when there is a knock at the door.

“Yes?”

Wynafyrd pokes her head in. “Apologies, Your Grace. But your brother requests a word,”

Sansa nods. She knots her hands together in her lap, her palms sweaty. She catches her breath and then she lifts her chin. “Bring him in.”

She watches the flames jump and leap behind the grate as she hears him enter the room. The door closes, the sound far too akin to something final and irreparable. 

“I’d have thought you would’ve have departed by now,” she says to him. “Darkness has been our closest companion this long winter and you and your men have far to travel.”

“Sansa.”

She stands rigid and tall and looks to him. “I am glad you all were able to come. It does us great honor to have the next leader of the North recognized by you.”

Jon crosses the room in two long strides. He grabs her by the arm and she stills. It has been so long since anyone has touched her without her leave.

“You should have told me.” A great deal of emotion pours from him, anger and shame ranking chief among them. She wishes that with a wave of her arm she could dismiss all he says. Dismiss him. “I promised myself—I would never—” and he stops. 

“I do not know what you imply.” She is shaking; she hopes he cannot notice. 

“You wish me to say it out loud? A bastard has gone and sired yet another.”

“You are not a bastard.”

“Spent my whole life as one though, haven’t I?” Anguish is writ obvious across his face. She did this to him, she thinks. She is not sure what she should feel in response, but what she finds is something that feels a lot like power. “Why,” and again, he stops himself. As if he does not know himself what he wishes to ask of her.

“And would you have stayed?” she hears herself ask, her voice as cold as the night their daughter was born. “If you knew, would you have stayed?”

“Don’t do that.”

She shakes her arm out of his grasp. She steps towards the door. “You ask me why?” She opens it, waits for him to come closer. He does; of course he does. 

“I needed an heir,” she says.

 

 

 

 

“Are you listening to me?” Robin says.

It is late into the evening and Sansa is tired. She is unsure of the root of it, but since Lyanna’s birth her husband has been far more talkative and open with her. Perhaps it is because he no longer feels the sexual element of their marriage is required of him; he has not touched her since she announced she was with child. But most nights now he asks her questions about the decisions she makes or will make, about trade plans, about travel. All of the questions are directed South and never North. He wishes to know when she will trek down to King’s Landing—“I won’t,” she said—and he wants to know if she might consider bettering her trade terms with the Lord of Highgarden—“Bronn is not a man you negotiate with; he is a man who will fleece you blind”—and if she intends for Lady Dustin to remain Hand of the Queen for the near future. “Why?” she had asked him. “Do you think you might do better?”

“What?” she says now. She pulls her robe tighter around her and settles into her side of the bed. "Of course I’m listening. Yes, what was it?”

“I said, have you ever been down to Greywater Watch?”

“No.” Sansa frowns. She stretches her legs. “What do you want with the Reeds?”

Beside her he shrugs. She can see the attempt at casualness, the effort Robin expends trying to make the gesture natural. He is learning, but she can’t help but fear it is all the wrong lessons he is taught and it is not her who serves as teacher. “I’ve never been.”

“No,” she says. “It’s a swamp. You’d hate it.”

"I didn’t know there were swamps in the North. Greywater Watch is in The Neck, isn’t it? I thought I’d heard that once, but I could not find it on any of your maps.” Sansa’s unease grows at his chattering.

“You wouldn’t,” she says. “It floats, you know. Makes it nigh unsearchable for people like you, or even ravens, to find.”

It’s the word raven that pings something in the back of her mind. The Reeds are the gatekeepers of the North at Greywater Watch, Howland Reed still serving as the Lord. She remembers his daughter, Meera. She hasn’t seen her in years, not since she brought Bran home. She has not left that swamp since. 

“What do you want with the Reeds?” she asks again.

“You are constantly telling me to be more involved.” Petulant mockery is rich in his voice. “So,” he holds his hands open.

Her husband is interested in the southernmost House of the North, the castle that moves, eliding discovery or worse. A place the ravens cannot find. “So,” she says, then nothing more.

 

 

 

 

“Jon did not come,” Beth says beside her, her disappointment plain.

The Free Folk have returned. She quietly watches their arrival, Jon’s absence among them markedly apparent. She expected as much, but it still stings. It will be Lyanna’s first name day in the coming weeks. She presses her lips together tightly. 

“He is not needed.” She watches Tormund dismount from his horse. He claps a heavy hand down on the man beside him and she can all but hear his laughter as he throws his head back. “He is not their leader.” She turns on her heel and retreats into the Great Hall. Beth scurries to follow. No one ever accuses Jon of cruelty. They should, she thinks. 

In place of Jon, Tormund has brought that same woman with him and his men; Inga is her name. “She reads letters and writes fine as any Southron cunt,” Tormund says by way of introduction. 

“It is good to meet you, Queen Sansa,” Inga says. She speaks blunt and plain, but without the bright and teasing tone that Tormund so often uses with her. She is lethally serious, and if there was time, Sansa thinks, she would have a great many questions for this woman. She fascinates her. There is a freedom paired with her power and strength, her obvious intelligence. She wants to know what that’s like—the freedom. 

Instead, her attention turns to her husband as he takes his seat beside her. Robin has become far more active on her small council in recent months and Sansa treats this development with the suspicion she feels it deserves. “Robin does nothing he has no wish to do. He wants something, but I can scarce tell what he is after,” she said to Lady Dustin.

“Everyone at that bloody table wants something, Your Grace.”

“Yes, then tell me—what does my husband want?”

Lady Dustin narrowed her eyes and her mouth twisted. “It’s what you already have, isn’t it? Power, of course. And it is what we must guard against.”

As the meeting begins she finds that without Jon there, she focuses on Tormund. She takes note of how he wields his power—a battering ram, nothing subtle about him. There is none of the flattery from him she witnessed and learned in King’s Landing and none of the slippery double or triple-edged promises made on a poisoned tongue. Perhaps he is so large a man he expects everyone else to mold themselves around him.

She works hard to quash the small flutter of nervousness within her. Strength must meet strength. She has never dealt with Tormund without Jon’s presence. She wonders if Jon ever advocated on her behalf to him. He never said as much to her, but even at her small council table Jon always found a way to gentle the Free Folk’s approach. Across from her, Tormund considers her with his own frank assessment. Briefly, her mind lights on the time she caught him with the maid in the empty corridor. She just as quickly banishes the thought.

The meeting quickly turns contentious as discussion of the old castles and keeps along the Wall are brought up. She is largely in agreement with Tormund that they should be converted into shared property, for both the Free Folk and the Northmen to occupy in an attempt to further stem the divide between their people. To facilitate more trading outposts than just Castle Black, to encourage joint settlements.

“You Wildlings must be thicker than I thought if you think we’ll give you our property for you to take.” Sansa freezes. She knew Robin was staunchly against further negotiations with the Free Folk, but she had assumed he knew better than to make his animosity so plainly known. He wields power like a boy waving a stick instead of a sword.

Tormund is watching her rather than her husband, a bright glint that looks a lot like danger in his eye. A long and uncomfortable pause stretches where no one speaks. Finally, Tormund takes his gaze off of her and turns to Robin.

“I know they call you King, but you speak to me like that again and I will tear your spine out through your mouth, boy. I promise you that,” Tormund says. He speaks slowly but deliberately, his fury tightly controlled but plain in every part of him: his voice, his face, the tension of his body. 

Robin pales before he flushes a furious pink. “You can’t,” he says, sputtering.

“I can and I will.”

“Enough,” Sansa says. She keeps her eyes on Tormund and not her husband. “The excitement of your arrival has clearly overtaxed us all. We will adjourn, break bread and most like a tankard or two of ale, and reconvene with clearer minds and in better spirits.”

She is the first to leave the room. She requests Robin come to her private solar. 

“You summon me?” he snaps. He slams the door shut behind him. “Do you think me a regular kitchen maid?”

“I have never had need to summon a kitchen maid,” Sansa says blithely. “A kitchen maid has yet to sabotage my attempts at peacemaking.” She signs her name to the scroll spread before her and then she glances up at him. “You cannot do that in there,” she says to him. She is seated behind her desk and she does not invite him to sit. “You will not do that in there.”

“Do what? One of us needs to stand our ground.” The disdain all but pours off of him as he crosses his arms over his chest. “I thought you were meant to be tougher than that, but look at you. Giving it all away to the enemy.”

“The enemy,” she repeats. She rubs at the back of her neck and looks up at him. “They are not our enemy. Tormund is not our enemy. Our enemy is to the south.”

Surprise crests over his face. “But he is your brother.”

“Have you spoken much to King Brandon Stark?” She does not recall Robin spending much time with her brother, neither at the council meeting that named Bran as King nor at his subsequent coronation. “He is much changed from the boy I once called my brother.” She does not say that she is much changed as well. War, grief, it all opens a vacancy in a person. There is no telling what might come to fill the void. Too much room for too many things to take up residence, things you in turn adopt and call your own. 

“You will not speak another word to Tormund should you rejoin the small council proceedings. You will not jeopardize our future. You will sit there, in silence, and gods willing you might learn something. I will not caution you again,” she says. She reaches for the next raven scroll waiting on her desk, all but dismissing him.

“You would take his side over mine?” She stills. 

Robin’s eyes are alit, as if he can spy treason at a distance and with it the promise of his power. He is a wily one, when he wants to be. She can picture his mother, her aunt, the wildness in her eyes. The desperation with which she clutched at what little she had. The way she fell. 

“I am a Queen,” Sansa says. “And I only treat with actual kings.”

“I am your King!”

“No,” she says. “You are my husband.”

 

 

 

 

“I apologize for the scene before.”

Sansa meets with Tormund that evening, alone. She pulled him from the feast in the Great Hall to meet with her. The small council chamber is emptied out save for the both of them.

“King Robin is new to diplomacy,” she continues, “and as a result overeager in his allegiance to Northern interests.”

“To his crown more like.” Tormund points at Sansa. “His interests are only his own. I need not tell you that, I hope.”

She says nothing. It will do her no good to take sides against her husband, not with him. It would only show weakness. “Will you apologize to me now?”

He laughs, surprised and delighted for it. “And what fucking for?”

“You cannot threaten murder on a King, not in the North.” His face goes serious for but a moment, and she knows they both are thinking of Gendry. At last, his mouth cracks into a harsh smirk.

“Let us call it small talk then and be done with it. My apologies for the offense, Queen Sansa. If I meant harm, you would know it.”

She is sure she would. “If you are finished mocking me, I thought we would achieve more should we negotiate in private. So many voices and so many opinions. We have no need for that. It is the two of us who know best how to serve our people, is it not?”

And it is. They spend the better part of the night working out the details of a settlement agreement. It’s as exhilarating as it is exhausting, the thrust and parry of a private negotiation. Having a leader meet her on her terms, acknowledge her experience, her intelligence, and her vision for the future. Tormund makes for a worth adversary as much as a great potential ally. Despite all that hangs in the balance here, it is the closest to enjoyment she recalls feeling in some time.

“Betray me, and I will have you killed,” Sansa says as she rises to her feet. “Is that how you wish we speak to each other?”

Tormund takes a step around the table towards her. His eyes crease even if his mouth does not spread open in a grin. “Only if you mean it.”

“I do. I will watch as they cut your head from your body if you think you can cross me.”

He laughs softly. He looks down at her with what she thinks is more than a glimmer of respect. “Jon Snow has no idea what you’ve become, does he?”

Her good humor sluices away and she feels herself go stony and hard. “And what is that?”

He does not answer her. He moves away from her, towards the door. “I will abide by your fucking terms. Put it all in writing and give it to Inga—she’ll make damn sure you’re not fucking me without my enjoyment.”

“Fine. We’ll bring everyone to the table tomorrow morning and inform them of our deal.”

Tormund nods. He pauses, the door at his fingertips. “You trust this little king of yours?”

“As much as I trust you.”

He shakes his head. “You lie far too easily, Wolf Queen. I see you.”

 

 

 

 

In Dara’s hand are two half-burnt letters.

“What’s this then?” Sansa says. 

Following Robin’s expressed interest in Greywater Watch, among other things, Sansa had tasked Dara with returning to her anything she considered irregular.

“Irregular, Your Grace?”

“Anything that gives you pause,” she said. 

Robin is many things she has found over the course of their marriage, but a schemer he is not. Each pointed question he asks of her when they are alone at night smacks of a plot born from a mind both smarter and riskier than his own. In the months since Sansa ordered Dara to pay special attention to the King she has had little to report. Little, until now. 

“I found them, Your Grace. In a cup he keeps on his desk.” His desk, Sansa thinks with derision. The King’s solar might as well be a child’s toy room. 

Sansa takes the two raven scrolls from Dara and she studies them, attempts to make out what information is left. The words she can still parse are incriminating enough. In the first scroll she reads, _the Seven Kingdoms restored if,_ and, _from the Wolf Queen_ , and, _earn her council’s sway_. So much foolishness to commit in writing; it grants her the smallest bit of relief but even more worry that she does not recognize the hand that wrote it. It was not Bran. The second scroll is mostly destroyed but there is the better part of a name still legible at the bottom— _Bronn_. Soot sticks to her fingers as what remains of the page threatens to crumble.

“Go to Lady Dustin. Tell her to convene the small council.”

 

 

 

 

“Before we begin, I find it necessary of me to ask you of your allegiances.”

She is met by blanket surprise and unease on her councillors’ faces. One seat sits empty: Lord Royce’s. 

“We have invited rats into our house.” Sansa drops the two scrolls onto the table. She explains what has been made abundantly clear both from her husband’s behavior as well as these missives: Robin has been working with Bronn and an unnamed party to the South in a bid to sway the North away from its support of Dorne and the Iron Islands, as well as a greater gambit to bring the North back under the yoke of Westeros. 

The worst part of betrayal is that you rarely know it when you first see it. It is not until later—her father’s head severed from his neck, the arrival to her home only to be handed off to the enemy—when the final blow settles and lands that you realize you have been crossed. 

“We will have to move quickly,” she says. “We will not be dragged back into the clutches of the South—not so long as I am Queen.”

“And what is to be done with the traitors?” Lord Blackwood asks. 

Traitors. Treason. It strikes fear cold and all-consuming in her. 

She knows what must be done. Robin and the Lords of the Vale are imprisoned, including Lord Royce despite his pleas of innocence. She sends a raven South informing Bran that Lord Robin Arryn has been stripped of his title as the King in the North and currently sits in a cell on the charge of treason and collusion with Bran’s own government to undermine her own. 

And she waits. She plans for the worst—war, that drum has begun to beat again—and the North rallies around her. It is days later that she receives a response from Bran’s court. It is an invitation: Tyrion Lannister is presently at The Twins and requests a parlay with the Queen in the North on behalf of the King of the Six Kingdoms. 

“He believes we hold the Lord of the Vale for ransom,” Lady Dustin says. “He expects you will negotiate.”

Sansa ignores her. “Write him I will come.”

“Don’t be a fool.” For all of Lady Dustin’s talk of vengeance, for all her stoking of the flames, of men’s tempers to lead to war, for once there is actual fear in her eyes.

“I want to look him in the eye when I tell him this betrayal will not stand.”

“I’d have thought you had learned better than to walk into the waiting jaws of a lion.”

Sansa stares at her. “I am a wolf. I have jaws and teeth of my own. And I shall go for his throat.”

Lady Dustin’s protests aside, Sansa prepares for her departure. She says good-bye to Lyanna, her heart in her throat. She does not know what to do with the girl most of the time, but the thought of yet another final farewell in her life, that she would start her daughter’s life without a mother, makes her ache.

“Send a raven to Jon,” Sansa says the night before she leaves. 

“Your Grace, last reports show he has gone deep Beyond the Wall. There are no guarantees such a message would reach him.”

“Address it to Tormund then. Yes, address it to Tormund and send it to Castle Black. Inform him of these developments. If I should be taken at The Twins, I want them to know the truth—not what Bran’s men will tell them.” She freezes. Bran. “No,” she says sharply. No ravens. The message, she thinks with cold clarity, would never reach them. Not by raven. The birds are Bran’s. “Send a rider, with the message on his person. Make sure it is Inga who reads it for him.”

She sits down and she pens the letter quickly herself. The ink smears across Tormund’s name and the side of her hand.

“It is possible, Your Grace,” Lady Tallhart says gently, “your brother is innocent of these machinations. They may move without his knowledge.”

Even after all this time, so many remain ignorant of Bran’s abilities. Even now, Sansa wishes this could be true.

“He sees everything,” Sansa says. “He knows.”

 

 

 

 

She arrives at The Twins, as ominous a place as any to treat with a Lannister. 

Sansa, along with her men, are led inside. Tyrion is waiting for her.

She sits down across from him. “The North is hardly known for palace intrigue. Imagine my surprise when I discover a plot, in part orchestrated by my own husband, to betray my kingdom’s independence to yours.”

Tyrion stills in pouring them each a glass of wine only to resume. “Your Grace. It is good to see you, too. You look well.”

“Stop,” she says. “I have no interest in whatever delicately clever things you have crafted to put me at ease. I have no patience or tolerance for treason. A sensible position, I should think. I have come here uninterested in hearing from you, but rather to tell you what shall come next. While I have my husband and his lords in chains, I demand the Four Kingdoms answer in kind and imprison Bronn, the named co-conspirator on Bran’s small council.”

“Two minor corrections, Your Grace.” Tyrion presses his lips together and sets the decanter down. “The first, and far be it for me to correct a Queen’s math, is that it is Six Kingdoms and not Four. And secondly, no one will be placing the Lord of Highgarden in a cell.”

“Then behead him in the streets for all I care,” she says lightly. “He has attempted to take what is mine, what I have fought for and what is recognized by King Brandon Stark who he serves.”

“I cannot, Your Grace.” The way he looks at her is with a terrible sort of kindness. Patronizing, she thinks. “He did as we agreed he should.”

Her hands feel very cold and she wants more than anything to clasp them together in her lap. She does not move. “Who is we?” she manages to say.

“You have to understand the position you have put us in by backing the Iron Islands and Dorne.” And there it is. Her worst suspicions, confirmed. Bran’s council, Bran himself, is working to take back the North. Her heart aches.

Sansa says nothing for a long beat. “Lord Arryn will pay for his crime of treason. This will not be negotiated.”

“And his men?”

“They plotted against me. It is my right to determine their fate. I owe you nothing.”

She stands and Tyrion follows suit. “I ask you remind my brother of his history. The North is free and independent. It was for thousands of years and from this day forward it will be for thousands more. Remind him. The North will remember this.”

 

 

 

 

She rides hard for Winterfell. Upon her return, mud and dirty snow still caked along her boots and the hem of her dress and cloak, Sansa orders the execution of her husband.

She sits silent, alone, before she heads down to the cells to speak with him. She stands aside as the guard unlocks his cell door, each sound impossibly loud in the grim enclosed space. The door creaks open, deafening, as if she is about to cross a threshold she will scarce ever return from. 

She enters his cell. 

Robin looks both older and younger than he has ever looked to her. A beard has grown in patchy and unkempt along his jaw and deep pitted circles have purpled beneath his eyes. He eyes her, not as a condemned man seeking mercy, but with hatred. 

“Do you have anything to say to me?” she asks him.

“My final words?” He has more steel to him now than she has ever known him to possess. She expected begging, pleading, wet eyes and the promise that he didn’t mean it. He did not know what he was doing. He knew; she can see that now.

“You betrayed me.”

“Yes, and you betrayed me.” Sansa goes very still. “I would say how unfortunate to raise a child without her father, but then you never needed me for that anyway, did you?”

“Even now, you speak lies.” She stands so rigid she feels as if she might first crack and then crumple to the floor in pieces.

“I became your King when you should have called me your Jester and given me horns to wear.”

She says nothing for a long moment. “Your remains will be sent back to the Vale. I will not have traitors interred in our crypt.”

“By the Seven,” Robin laughs. A note of hysteria spikes his voice. “You are nothing and everything as I remember you, so long ago. Alayne. How is that possible?”

She considers him. “I suppose much like trees we grow to suit the environment we find ourselves forced to live in. Our roots curl and our branches bend, and if we are wise, we find a way to still stand tall.” She approaches the cell door and raps her fist on it twice. “Or we are cut down. Farewell, Sweetrobin.”

 

 

 

 

The morning of her husband’s execution dawns bright and clear. The sky shines down as they gather, the air crisp and cold enough it hurts to breathe. 

They have yet to bring Robin out into the yard. She will have to decide what she will do with Robin’s men. With Lord Royce. She feels a deeper pang as she considers his fate. He has stood at her side for so long; she wants to believe him when he tells her that he knew nothing of Robin’s plot. It is so difficult, to balance hope with reality, naivety with cynicism. 

She looks out over her lands. She can hear the sharp _whick_ as a broadsword is sharpened on a whetting stone. She thinks of her father, the lessons he taught his sons but failed to teach his daughters. She was left to learn the hard way—on her own. 

After, when she walks back through the gate, the rider she sent to Castle Black will return to her with a message. Tormund, the King Beyond the Wall, he will say, declares the Free Folk stand with the Queen in the North against the South.

 

 

 

 

Together they watched Jon leave King’s Landing. They returned to the Red Keep together.

“What was the point of any of it?” Bran did not look at her; he continued to look out over what remained of the city. It was his city now. “Jon’s parentage, his name. His claim to the throne. The reason that red priestess brought him back to life. Why any of it?”

“Just because the war has ended it does not mean the story has.”

The breeze brushed against her, cool for King’s Landing. The smell of ash and smoke carried with it, even then. She did not envy Bran having to live here. She could not leave this gods-forsaken city fast enough.

“What comes next will matter,” Bran said. “And what comes after that. You’ll cling to the before. It’s what people do. It’s what you’ll do, even if it’s the present that matters most of all.” She did not know what he meant, but still she nodded.

“Be well, Bran,” Sansa said. “And be good, as King.”

Bran finally looked at her. “And you as Queen, sister.”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, first of all, I cannot thank you all enough for both your interest and for reading this. I'm thrilled to have you all here, on whatever this wacky adventure is! This chapter took longer than expected to post, and I apologize for that; real life apparently heard of my plans to finish this quickly and decided to intervene.
> 
> There is one chapter left now, and I am hoping to have it posted in the coming week. In the mean time, thank you again for reading and feel free to enjoy my gold standard I AM WRITING GAME OF THRONES FIC, THIS SONG HAS TO BE ON THE PLAYLIST track: ["Dragon's Lair,"](https://youtu.be/y9QF7mbsd10) Sunset Rubdown.
> 
> And last thing! If you want to come yell, at me or with me, over on tumblr you can find me @widespindriftgaze.


	3. III.

 

 

 

Widowed for a third time, Sansa is alone. Her brother’s court plots against her in the South and both Dorne and the Iron Islands look to her for support she cannot give. And, despite the promises from Tormund, her people continue to fight with his. The skirmishes are rarer now than they were a year ago, but each time they crop up in the far North panic tightens in her chest. She needs unity, on at least one of these fronts.

Months have passed since Robin’s execution, a time best defined by dark paranoia. There is a dangerous current of distrust that runs through Winterfell, as slippery as any ice floe. It’s Sansa at the center of it, doubtful and suspicious of each and every person that surrounds her. Her ladies, who in these past months have learned to keep their distances, her maids, even her small council. She looks to each of them as if betrayal is inevitable and it is only a matter of time.

It is no way to live.

Now, Sansa sits in her chambers. Dara slowly unbraids her hair and heavy strands of red fall down over her shoulders. She just left another fruitless meeting with her small council. More and more it feels like a war council, even if amongst the myriad concerns she and the North face, her lack of issue has returned to the table. One heir is necessary, but another—a spare, she thinks wryly—is imperative. She knows what comes next. She wonders which suitors her advisors will trot out the next time the small council gathers. 

Dara’s fingers snag in Sansa’s hair and she hisses. “I am sorry, Your Grace.”

“It’s fine.” It’s not fine. It’s not Dara. As of late, Sansa finds herself overwhelmed by the furious desperation she feels that she must prove herself. It’s as vital an impulse as protecting herself. Worse still, she is haunted by the old fear that all of this can be taken from her at any time. She thinks often of falling through ice. When she closes her eyes, she can see herself. Her hands above the surface, scrabbling over ungiving cold, unable to find any purchase as she slips down lower, frozen. Drowning and alone.

“What would you do, Dara, if you were in my position?”

Dara has long ago shrugged off the impulse to demur or decline a response when Sansa asks her for one. Now, her fingers still in Sansa’s hair. Sansa stares at her own face in the reflection of the glass above the vanity. She has grown older, but of course she has. Dark circles smudge beneath weary but bright eyes; her mouth is grim and her cheekbones harsh under her pale skin. 

“You cannot lose the North, Your Grace. If I was Queen, I would do anything in my power to keep it, no matter what.”

“We do not have the men, the horses, the supplies and the energy for what that effort could come to cost us.”  


Dara resumes brushing out Sansa’s hair. 

“No, Your Grace. But perhaps you could make a King who does.” Even Dara then, Sansa thinks ruefully. She sighs. She is so tired of the failure of men closest to her. “A King,” Dara continues, tentative, as if she fears she oversteps, “who understands what it means for the North to remain free.”

Sansa looks to Dara in the glass. Their eyes meet. Dara blinks first. She drags the brush through the ends of Sansa’s hair. “How does the Princess fare?”

Sansa returns her gaze to her own reflection. “She is well, thank you.”

“Does she miss her father?”

Sansa knows what she must do. “Of course she does,” she says.

 

 

 

 

Sansa rides North, bound for Castle Black.

She had sent word ahead, and Jon stands there, his hands clasped before him, waiting and alert as any sentry. He holds her horse’s bridle in hand as she dismounts. She does not say anything, but she embraces him; his arms feel loose around her body. It is so curious to her, how she misses him the most when he is right in front of her. When she can feel the heat of his body against hers and feel as it fades away. 

“Tormund is still a day’s ride out,” Jon says in lieu of a proper greeting. 

“I did not come here for him.”

Jon clenches his jaw and she watches him adjust his posture. “We have been keeping the peace, if that’s what this is about.”

“That’s not what this is about, not exactly.” She looks around the yard. Some interest has been afforded her arrival by the Free Folk assembled here but not enough to bring them any closer. Still, she turns to Jon. “Might I have a private audience with you?”

He nods. She follows him. How long has it been since she saw him last? They parted on such a sour note, Jon looking at her as if she was any other mercenary willing to spend anything to keep a crown. Since then, she has dealt primarily with Tormund. She wonders how much Jon has known and how much she deserves to resent him for not reaching out to her. Her husband betrayed her and she had him killed. She has been alone, isolated from anyone and everyone—even him. 

She feels nervous as she steps into the room behind him, the spartan interior of his chambers. The fire has gone down behind the grate and the room is chilled. Sansa pulls her cloak around her as she takes a seat.

“I will not keep you in suspense. As I am sure you know, much has occurred in recent months. The rest of the world keeps banging on the North’s door demanding what I cannot or will not give. I am looking to the future, of not just my reign but the North’s survival as an independent state. I know I must consolidate my power,” and she pauses, all too aware that she will not be able to take back what she says next, “which is why I have come to you.”

“To me?” Jon frowns.

“Don’t be dense,” she says softly. "The North has no patience for an unmarried Queen.” She reaches across the table and she takes his hand in hers. “I have spent weeks, months, looking for the way forward, and I am certain I have it now. I can bring you home, Jon. I will pardon you and marry you. You will be returned to your role as the King in the North. The North crowned you as King once before, and I know, they will welcome you back. We will make your true identity known, that not only are you the King in the North but you are the rightful Targaryen heir. What better warning is there for the South?” She squeezes his hand in hers. “We would unite the North, the entire North, and together, you and me? We would be unstoppable.”

Sansa can feel it, the moment she loses him. Jon's hand goes lax in her grip and he leans back from her, pulling from her grasp. 

Jon sighs deeply before he speaks. “It’s impossible.” He lifts his eyes to hers. “I’m sorry. It cannot be.”

Sansa sits back in her chair, stunned and hurt. Any darker emotions are initially crowded out by embarrassed rejection. It has never been laid so plain between them: Jon has no interest in what she has to offer him. She can’t help but think of Gendry, the resolute expression on his face as he told her of how he had asked Arya to marry him. He had wanted it, he said, and he thought wanting it should be enough to make it real. Has she made the same mistake? Looking at Jon now she knows she has. She has operated from the same magical thinking, that to want something should be enough. She should have known better; if wanting was all it took, then there would be peace. 

“You could be with your daughter,” she says. 

Jon’s face shifts, cold and hard, as if she has proven something he has long suspected of her. “You would use her as a bargaining chip?” He shakes his head. “I don’t know you at all.”

“Yes, you do,” she snaps, impatient. "Same as I know you.”

“But you don’t, do you Sansa? Do you even listen when I speak to you? I have told you, again and again, and yet you still come to me with this.” He pauses, shakes his head. “I can never be King. I won’t ever be. Not after what I did.”

And she can see it in him. After all this time, he still loves her. He still loves Daenerys. He would rather cling to that hurt and that lost love than let himself be forgiven. Let himself move forward. She grits her teeth; what a waste. What weakness.

“So this is the future you plan for yourself then? Running about Beyond the Wall, alone? Creating your own penance to serve, for her?”

She can’t do anything with the mournful way he looks at her. Her eyes sting and she looks away from him. She stands and goes to the window and looks out on the bustling trade post below. At least one thing has begun to go right.

“It’s not a bad idea, uniting the North and the Free Folk through marriage.” Jon says it in such a conceding tone, as if he is trying to give her something, anything, other than what she wants. “It would be a hard sell, though. The Free Folk place a different custom on marriage.”

“Does it matter?” she says archly. “You have already declined.”

“Not me,” he says. Her chest tightens. “Tormund.”

She laughs; she can’t stop herself. “No,” she says.

“He’s a good man, Sansa.”

“Be serious, Jon.”

“I am. I swear it. He’s King Beyond the Wall. The match would make sense, two leaders joining their people.” Jon approaches her. “He would do good by you and good for the Free Folk.”

Hot anger tightens like a vise inside of her. She feels trapped, helpless. After all this time, her only true bargaining chip remains her body and who she can give it to. Her body, her bed, both weaponized to keep a peace that becomes more farcical by the day. She feels something like hysterical laughter trip its way up her throat. “You won’t have me so you offer me to _him_ like a horse to be traded?”

“That’s not how I mean it. You know that.”

“Why can’t it be you?” she hears herself ask. _Why can’t it ever be me?_ she does not say. And perhaps that is their problem: they speak at cross-purposes to each other. They do not say what they mean out of fear of disturbing what little they have managed to build between them. What does it matter now? She squares her shoulders and asks him: “Why can’t it ever be me?”

“Please. Don’t.” He steps to her and reaches for her face. She raises her hand and bats his away, ducking her face from his view. He takes her into his arms then, holding her with the same terrifying finality she characterizes all their departures. Sansa pushes him away suddenly. She turns her back to him, her arm wrapped tightly around her middle. Tormund Giantsbane. By the Old Gods and the New, she thinks.

She turns to face Jon, composed now. “I would need to consult with my small council before such an arrangement could be made. And, I imagine, you should inform your King Beyond the Wall you have offered his hand in marriage to me, of all people.”

 

 

 

 

“It’s preposterous!”

Her council reacts precisely as she predicted. She catches Lady Dustin’s eye; she sits at the table uncharacteristically silent. 

“A union to Jon Snow was bad enough,” Lord Overton says darkly, Jon’s name spat out as if it might bite him. “But this cannot stand.”

“Jon declined the prospect of marriage. Tormund, The King Beyond the Wall, was his suggested alternative.”

“Absolutely not,” Lord Royce thunders. It is the most vocal he has been since he was restored to his seat on her small council in recent weeks. Lady Dustin had been staunchly against it and lobbied Sansa to send him back to the Vale. It was not right, Sansa said to her, to punish him for the actions of the Vale when for so long he has been a defender of the North. A defender of _her_. 

“Your generous heart will be the end of you, Your Grace,” Lady Dustin said.

“My heart is hardly generous,” Sansa replied.

“It is an insult,” Lord Royce continues, “to both you and the Stark name, not to mention the North. A Wildling? As your husband and as King? No. It cannot stand.”

“The Free Folk are of the North, and their alliance is needed now more than ever,” Sansa says with as much patience as she can muster. Lady Dustin still has not commented. “Tormund has proven himself a capable leader, and will prove himself a good partner to encourage peace.”

“It is his men who murdered King Gendry!”

“Dangerous outliers, and the guilty have been dealt with. It was Tormund himself who executed them for their crime against our King.”

Lady Tallhart leans towards Sansa. “If Jon has refused, then you wait. You need not rush to marry.”

“And this from the same council who repeatedly reminds me of my lack of progeny at every spare second of the day?” Sansa is met with silence. “It is the easiest card for me to play.” Again, she looks to Lady Dustin only to find her Hand’s brow furrowed, deep in her own contemplation. If Sansa is being honest, it is only Lady Dustin’s opinion she is curious to hear. She is not seeking any counsel; she has already made up her mind. She is behaving far more cavalier than she actually feels. She has not let herself even begin to imagine the reality of a future shared with this man—should he even accept the offer. Each step she has taken since leaving Castle Black has been from the vantage that he will accept, that he would not dare reject such an opportunity. 

Her failure of imagination is not limited to his potential declination. She also cannot decide which man to picture when it comes to Tormund—the one she had first met at the Wall, by turns leering and a warrior primed for battle; the drunken oaf of a man she had witnessed after the defeat of the dead; or, the imposing and solid leader she has long now endeavored to find a middle ground for their people to share. No man is simple, she would be a fool to assume it, and it is entirely possible he is all three of these men. He could be more.

“My Queen,” Lord Blackwood begins.

“I will do what needs done,” she snaps. Lady Dustin looks at her, long and steady. There is a sorrow there that Sansa immediately resents. “When have I not?” Lady Dustin nods. She has her approval.

 

 

 

 

Tormund comes to Winterfell.

“So this is where a Queen does her business?”

He is brought to her in her solar. They are alone. He looks around the room with detached disinterest and she cannot help but think he does not belong in here. She should have met him elsewhere. In the yard, the stables, she thinks unkindly. 

“Thank you for joining me. Please,” and she gestures to the chair before her.

With a grunt, Tormund sits down across from her. He takes up so much space. She is not used to that in a man. Jon, perhaps, but she spent so long beside him, crafting herself around the shape he made, that she failed to notice. 

“So Jon tells me the Red Wolf looks to take another mate.”

“I would hardly phrase it that way.” 

“I’m told you need a King, a formal alliance, and more heirs for your little throne. Sounds to me like you’re looking for a mate.”

“I prefer the word marriage. I am seeking a marriage.”

“And with me of all men,” he laughs. “One problem for you and what you seek: my people do not marry as you do in the South. You would not like it. We steal our wives.”

Sansa says nothing for a long pause. “No. I don’t suppose I would like that.” She pauses again, formulating her course of attack. “Think of it not as marriage then, but rather a mutually-beneficial partnership. The two of us shall lead the North as one, my people and yours, into a fruitful and prosperous future. We will carry them through what remains of the winter and create a bulwark against any attempted incursion on our freedom from the South.”

“You have a tongue made for politics, don’t you?” He lifts his chin and looks down his nose at her. “You ask much of me.”

“No more than you could handle. I ask you to continue to do as you already do for your people, and that is to lead them.”

“The Free Folk do not follow a man because he puts a piece of twisted metal on his head and calls it a crown. They do not follow because they are told this man was born in the good house to the good name. A man must earn a people’s leadership.”

“As you have,” she says.

“Look at you. Sucking my cock with your words because you are smart.” She does not even blink. He will not rattle her. “But, yes. I have.”

“And you think I have not?”

“I think you have earned yours and not mine.” Blunt, straight-forward—and not entirely untrue. She grinds her back teeth together and she swallows down any quick rejoinder that might poison her tongue. 

“Then help me to earn it. With you by my side, won’t that bring me more than nothing?”

“With me by your side, I stand to lose everything.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says softly. “Jon wouldn’t let you.”

“You know I am only here before you because of him.”

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. Of course she knows that. “It is why I am here as well.”

Tormund settles back in his chair and openly studies her. Her face, her neck, down her chest to the bend of her waist and then back up again. “You’re tall,” he says, only with a slight begrudging. “I like that in a woman.”

“You would be the fifth man I take as my husband.” She can play this game, too. Let him be reminded of those who fell before him.

“And may I prove to have better luck than the fucking lot of them.” His eyes darken even as his mouth lifts. “Is this your way of telling me you’re no blushing maid? You know well how to take a cock?”

He’s testing her. Sansa does not move a muscle. Not for the first time, her mind wanders to the tableau he and the maid had made in the corridor. She dismisses the thought immediately. “I know how to do my duty.”

“A duty to you is it?” He leans forward, his forearms braced against the table between them. “Then, Queen of the Ice, you have been doing it wrong.”

“If you wish to bed me, fine,” she snaps. “You’ll have to marry me first.” His mouth slowly stretches and he bares his teeth in a grin that could only be described as wolfish. She ignores him, turns over what he said in her head. The Queen of the Ice. She has heard the nickname before. “What do your people tell you of me?” she asks him.

He appears to relish the reply. “That you’re cold. It’d be a long winter indeed to share a bed with a woman so frozen as you. That between your legs I’d find only ice and most like lose a finger for the effort.”

“And is that what you believe of me?”

“No. I don’t.” He inhales, considering her. He leans in that much closer, his hands clasped between them, inches from her own frozen hands. He meets her eye. “I’ve yet to meet man or woman who’s fury burns hotter than yours. Not even the Dragon Queen. You’re so angry and you don’t know where to put it.” She takes a deep breath. She feels seen, caught, as if when he came through that door he stripped her, not just of her clothing, but her very skin. He reaches forward and his fingers close around a strand of her hair. “Kissed by fire—no wonder you burn so harsh.”

She swallows. She pulls away from him and he drops his hand. “Does that frighten you?” she asks.

“Never.”

Neither says anything for a moment. This is only the second time she has ever been alone with him. Should he accept, she will be alone with him constantly. They will build a life together here in the North. She finds she is more afraid of the prospect now that she has spoken with him than she was before her small council.

“If I am to do this,” Tormund finally says; he waves his hand, “marriage, I have two conditions.”

Sansa fights to keep her face placid. “You have two conditions,” she says coolly. “For me.”

“Aye. The first—I have two daughters.” Sansa’s surprise deepens; her face does not move. “And you have a daughter. Lyanna,” he says. Her blood chills. 

“Yes.” She cannot see the obvious angle here for him. “Your daughters are no concern of mine. They are free to live as they wish.”

“I should fucking hope so.”

“Lyanna will inherit the North.”

“Yes. You in the South love your inheritances,” he says, dismissive. He crosses his arms over his chest. “Lyanna was your aunt’s name, yes?”

“It was.” Dread sticks thick within her. 

“It was Jon Snow’s mother’s name, too, yes?”

She feels as if he has driven a stake straight through her. Tension pulls her body tight and defensive. He cocks his head and watches her before he speaks again.

“I remember when I first saw you, Wolf Queen. You came through the gates at Castle Black. You had the big woman with you. You were cold. And I watched, how the little crow looked at you. He ran to you. And I knew—this scared girl is important.”

Sansa does not move. She vaguely remembers Tormund there, on the periphery of both her reunion with Jon and that entire stretch of time. 

“I am a great many things, good and bad, but blind I am not.” She still says nothing. “Jon Snow will father no more of your children. That role belongs to me now. He will not fuck you. That is mine as well. You will not tell me lies. I will not be those other men who once were yours.”

Her chest rises and falls as she breathes deeply. The risk to her is easier to focus on than any of the rest. “And who will you tell? Who will receive this knowledge from you?”

Tormund lifts his eyebrows and leans forward again, over the table and towards her. “From me? My Queen,” and he says the honorific as if it is anything but. “The telling is not for me to give. Crowns and succession and every stupid fucking thing you kneelers devote yourself to is none of my concern. I do not care who fucked Lyanna into you. Gendry or the Little King or Jon—that is past. All I ask is that you stop. I will be no woman’s fool. Not even a queen’s.” His eyes fix on hers and she wills herself not to blink. “Not even yours.”

“Jon would not do that to you,” she says quietly.

Something sparks across his face; she thinks she wants to call it interest. “But you would?”

“No. But you do not know me yet. It would be an empty promise, I fear.” She pauses. “I agree, so long as you agree the same in kind.”

He laughs. “A shame,” he says. His grin is bawdy and performative, but his eyes remain careful, watchful. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” He nods. “It is agreed.”

“What is your second condition?”

“Your little brother, the King. He can’t fuck, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“He can’t have children.”

“No,” she says, baffled. “He cannot.” Neither condition has been what she has expected and she makes no effort now to hide her surprise. “Why?”

“How will those cunts in King’s Landing decide who rules when he dies?”

“There is a council in place, to select the next King or Queen. Or, that was the plan.” Recent events call everything into question now.

Tormund arches an eyebrow. “A council,” he repeats. His face goes very serious then. “No child of ours will go South, least of all to rule.” He gauges her reaction, she thinks, as he pauses. “Our children,” he continues, “will be of the North and they will remain in the North. They don’t go South.”

Sansa fixes her gaze on his face. He stares straight back. “I have lost every person I have ever loved to King’s Landing in one fashion or the other. I will never send another I love down there.” He nods again. She presses her mouth into a firm line.

She sits up straighter. “I agree to both of your conditions.”

“Good. And what are yours to be?”

Sansa catches herself about to fidget in her seat. She stops herself. Tormund is the closest she has ever come to equal footing with a potential husband. She finds it both off-putting and exhilarating. She had foolishly assumed, much as her marriages to both Gendry and Robin had gone, that she would dictate the partnership from their vows forward. No negotiation was necessary with either; they were lucky to have her. Until they weren’t. 

“We will live here, at Winterfell. We will work to keep the peace. I will not expect your people to kneel to me but I will require their obedience, their cooperation, and their deference, all to be encouraged by you. I will need your support. I will not be betrayed by you.”

That startles his own surprise. “Marriage may not come naturally to the Free Folk, but I understand loyalty. I would not betray you,” he says. His smiles. “If only out of my love for Jon.”

“How nice we have something in common to share.”

She rises to her feet, cold and deliberate. He does not stand. He looks up at her.

“We have an agreement?”

He gets up then and he takes her hand. His grip is warm; her hand disappears inside his grasp. He squeezes once. “Aye, wife. We do.”

 

 

 

 

Sansa leads Tormund— _her betrothed_ , she thinks, the words landing like a stone in her gut—back out through the castle. Curious eyes catch on the both of them as they pass and dread sits thick in her throat. 

A maid scurries into their path and freezes. Her mouth slackens as she looks past Sansa’s shoulder. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace.” She sketches a hasty curtsey and bows her head, her cheeks a bright pink as she looks not at Sansa but at Tormund. 

For once, he seems uncertain: he appears caught between the indecision to leer at the maid in reply or to remain solid and silent. And Sansa knows—of course she knows. She waits for her departure past them down the hall. The maid skitters along, glancing back at them continuously, her mouth pulled tight as if trapping a laugh, until she turns a corner. 

“You have lain with her, I take it?” Her face only flushes some as she speaks.

His mouth curls down as he shrugs. “Had to find some way to occupy myself on our long visits here.”

Sansa’s memory immediately flashes to him, a different maid, a different corridor. “She will be removed from Winterfell.” She pauses. “And the others, as I am sure she was not the only one to have you?”

Tormund rubs at his beard, contemplative and hardly sheepish. “In my defense, I stuck my cock in them before I knew you’d want to wed me.”

“They all will be removed. I will not be humiliated in my own home.” She lifts her chin. “I will need names.”

 

 

 

 

“I am sure you have heard the announcement by now?”

Dara looks over to Sansa from the wardrobe. She shuts it. “Yes, My Queen.”

“I am to marry Tormund Giantsbane.” It is the single most nonsensical statement she has ever uttered. Dara watches her carefully, her face guarded and serious. She has developed into someone canny and clever and Sansa will be sorry to see her go. She must though, now that Sansa knows. 

“He told you? Your Grace?” Dara finally says. She will miss that about her, too—the easy ability to know what Sansa is thinking without a word said. 

“He did. At the least I can vouch for the future King’s honesty. I imagine you could vouch for far more,” she says acidly. Dara drops her head. Shame immediately wells up and Sansa bites the inside of her cheek. She wishes she knew where this hatefulness comes from. It’s so easy, a spring that flows easy and hot within her. 

“Your Grace. I meant no disrespect. I could never have known—”

Sansa holds up a hand. “No. No one could ever have known,” she says softly. The indecision Sansa had felt earlier is gone, replaced by the sad determination to dismiss her. She does not want to let Dara go, but she cannot have her stay. She would become a constant reminder of potential humiliation, for gossip. That her own handmaid has already lain with her husband, the King in the North—she would be mocked for it endlessly. And when their door would close each night, Dara would already know what is to happen behind it. It would be untenable. She cannot allow it. 

Sansa has never known how to share. Not easily. Even as a child, it would come to her as an affront to be asked to share any little thing with her siblings. What was hers was hers alone, or, at least, that was how she wanted it. She has not much changed as she has grown. She will not share the North with the South. She will not share carnal knowledge of her husband with her maids. She would not share Jon with Daenerys. Lord Baelish had always known which fears of hers to prey on, and even at the end, he had not missed his mark. She is glad he is dead. She is glad he had not seen her as she looked at Daenerys over Jon’s shoulder as she held him to her. 

“Your services have ben appreciated these years past,” Sansa says now to Dara, her heart heavy. The dismissal makes the reality of what she is to all the more stark. She is doing this. She will marry Tormund. Not for the first time, she thinks of her mother. She wonders what she would think of all this. She does not often allow herself to think of Catelyn. To ask herself if she would be proud of the woman her daughter has become. She fears the answer. “A position has been found for you at White Harbor with Lady Manderly.”

“Your Grace,” Dara bows low. Her voice is cold. “You are too generous.”

 

 

 

 

The wedding is quick and private. Only her Northmen and his Free Folk are in attendance. The tension between the two factions is plain and fierce. Suspicion ranges on either side; “Your own men think you mad,” Lady Dustin warned as Sansa was dressed for the ceremony. “They believe you have taken leave of your senses. They think the Wildling King has bewitched you.”

Sansa snorted, indelicate. “Hardly,” she said.

There has been no enchantment, not on either side. Before the wedding, earlier that day, Sansa went to him with a gift. It was a crown, blunt and crude but handsomely made. 

Tormund had picked it up gingerly from her hands, handling it as if it were a wild and fanged creature, liable to bite. “What is this?”

“A crown. For a King.”

His mouth turned down and he held the crown out to her. “I don’t want it.”

“You will be the King in the North alongside me, the Queen. There are expectations attached to the role.”

“I don’t want a crown, and I do not want any man on his knees before me.” He thrust the crown back at her. “You can keep it.”

“It’s already made,” she snapped, her impatience high. “It’s yours. Do with it as you like.” She had turned on her heel and left him, gone to her chambers to prepare for their wedding.

Now, she steps into the godswood, dressed as plainly as she ever has for any of her weddings. It is the fourth time she has walked through this godswood to meet the man to be her husband. This is the last time, she tells herself. For good or ill. She will not do this again. This— _he_ —will be the last. 

Tormund watches her approach and she does not have a name for the look he levels her with. There is scrutiny there, and maybe even judgment, but something more than that. She tries to consider him objectively as she comes closer. She looks to him as if she has only met him now. He is older than her other husbands, but attractive, she supposes, if one went in for rough and vicious and unkempt. If intimidation was something she could want.

And then, she does what she must. She takes him for her husband. She makes him their King.

 

 

 

 

The reception afterwards is rowdy. Despite the obvious tension between her men and Tormund’s, the heavy flow of wine and ale does not lead to the violence she had anticipated. Feared. Jon is among the men present, and other than the brief bow he sketches before the both of them and the congratulations he offers, he has kept a low profile. _This could have been you and me_ , she thinks as she watches him cut through the crowd at the back of the Hall. _But this is what you wanted_.

Sansa sits quietly, miserable as she has ever been at each and every wedding feast that has been held in her and her husband’s honor. Beside her, Tormund laughs. More ale sloshes onto the table as he gestures wide with his arm. She does not move; she wonders if he will douse her with it. She imagines the humiliation of it, and weaves herself a fine web of embarrassment and fury. She is itching for a fight, she realizes. Her eyes dart to the back of the Hall, but Jon is gone. She hopes he will give her a reason. 

He doesn’t. Tormund continues to celebrate with his men, leaving her to sit alone at the head table. It’s easy enough for her to slip away. Each of the three weddings she has endured as Queen in the North she has banned the bedding ceremony. 

“The one custom you kneelers do right and you’d deprive me of the joy of it?” Tormund had teased her. That had been the same day he had agreed to marry her. They stood in the yard with the horses and he had swung his body up easy and near graceful onto his mount. She had said nothing. She watched him ride away, and she knew when he returned he would be hers.

Now, his laugh booms through the Great Hall and Sansa heads to her bed chamber, alone.

 

 

 

 

Their wedding night passes without consummation. 

Sansa’s maids undress her in silence, none of the pre-coital tittering she had feared they would supply. When she had married Gendry, they each felt the need to remind Sansa of how handsome he was. With Robin they had done similar, the flattery that much more obvious and exaggerated. None say a word now. None ask her where he is, when he will be coming, if she is either glad or relieved for his current absence. 

She slips into bed and she leaves the candles to burn, guttering down to the stubs as the wax bleeds. The waiting is near worse than anything. She braces herself for what she thinks to be inevitable. He will come to her, stinking of ale, and he will mount her on all fours like an animal. _Like Ramsay_ , she begs herself not to think. It passes her mind that she could be wrong. She had seen Tormund with that maid in the corridor and nothing of the woman had belied anything less than pleasure. She cannot imagine Dara subjecting herself to any brutal treatment. Or, the maid in the hall—the way that girl had looked at him did not speak of humiliation or shame, but something as fundamental and out of reach for Sansa as heady want. 

Maybe she is wrong about him. She does not let herself think of Jon. 

Tormund comes to her late in the night. He collapses alongside her in the bed, his clothing still on. He sighs heavily.

“Good night, wife,” he grumbles. He does not touch her. 

She glances over at him, sprawled out beside her. She lays still, flat, on her back, as movable and desirable as a corpse. His eyes are half-lidded and then they close. Sansa rests a hand over her chest and she feels each breath in and out. He begins to snore. Her breath catches. What has she done.

 

 

 

 

The next night her maids dress her in a robe and her hair is loose in a braid. She finds her husband already in their bed chamber, his eye sharp as he watches her shut the door behind her. 

The day had been long, their first as joint leaders of the North. She woke to an empty bed, eyes gritty with lack of sleep. His own men, slow and groggy from the festivities the night before, prepared for their departure. Jon was with them. She wished him safe travels, her voice distant and remote. 

“It’s for the best,” he said. His gaze drifted past her shoulder to where Tormund stood. “I promise you, Sansa.”

She stands before Tormund now, painfully aware of where their marriage left off the night previous. “I had thought we would get this over with last night,” she says archly.

“‘Get this over with,’” he repeats, low and thick. “You’re a piece of work, Wolf Queen.”

But Tormund gets to his feet and he begins to disrobe. “Were you this eager to mount your other husbands?”

Sansa does not know where to look. Despite what they are about to do, she does not think she wants to watch him undress. She is so used to him in layers of clothing, furs and boots and everything necessary to survive in the far North. He’s no smaller without them. His shoulders are built wide, and from what she can see in the opened notch of his tunic, his chest is broad and angrily scarred.

“I did what I needed to do.”

He reaches down to remove his boots. “You care to remind your current husband what befell each? I like to know what I’m in for.”

He is teasing her. Still, she will take him at face value and she will remind him the consequences of crossing her. “I never consummated the marriage with Tyrion and I fled King’s Landing without him, leaving him charged with the murder of his nephew, the King. I fed Ramsay to his dogs and took back Winterfell from him. Gendry was killed,” and she trails off. Tormund fixes her with a pointed look and she returns it. She clears her throat. “Robin was executed for treason.”

“If ever you decide I have earned myself a similar fate, I ask it be you to hold the blade, wife.”

“Are you planning to betray me?”

“I would not dare.” He pauses, and if it is possible, the tension is that much thicker between them. “I would want it to be you. It’s only right.”

Sansa bites down on an incredulous laugh. The image of her holding an executioner’s blade aloft is absurd enough to warrant only one reaction. She doubts she would even be able to lift it. “I wouldn’t even know how. I’d butcher you, make a mess of it. It’d be an unclean death.”

“Then I shall have to teach you.” Tormund tears his tunic off overhead. He sits on the edge of the bed. “Come,” he says. He is distractingly big. His torso is heavily scarred, and a couple of them beggar belief as to how a man could survive such a wound. “Come,” he says again when she does not move.

She goes to him. His grip is firm the he grabs her by the waist and hauls her to him. Her teeth sink into her tongue but she does not make a sound. He lifts her into his lap and she lets him. She tells herself she lets him. She tries to slow her breathing, calm herself. All this time, and a man’s hands on her, a man’s body this close and this purposeful to her own, still sparks a bit of fear in her. It never really goes away, she thinks, the things people did to each other. She has merely learned to live with it.

Tormund takes her wrist in hand, his grip firm but yielding. It brings her right back to the present. He raises her hand to a spot beneath his jaw. He presses her hand there and beneath her fingers she can feel his pulse as it steadily thumps. “Here is good. Quick. Stab, and the life pours straight out.”

Sansa’s brows knit together. Her fingers twitch against him; he must be able to feel the leap of her own pulse in her wrist. “Only a fool would show an adversary the easiest path to victory.”

His eyes darken that much more but his pulse remains unmoved beneath her fingers. “We are adversaries now?”

“We would be, should you give me cause to lift a sword against you.”

He says nothing to that even as his mouth tips up. He drags her hand down his neck, the muscled expanse of his chest to rest above his heart. “Here is harder. You have to use force, get past the bone.” His hand is warm as it covers her own. His flesh is hotter. She can feel his heart, stronger than the blood flowing in his neck. His skin is roughened beneath her touch—someone had clearly tried in the past to go for this very heart but failed. “A killer does not need to wield a sword. A smaller blade will reap the same.”

He pulls her hand lower, down to his stomach. She can feel the ripple of muscle beneath the skin when he moves. “Guts are messy and slow. They stink. Good in battle—it’ll slow a man and kill him eventually, but for executions?” He shakes his head. “Get up,” he says, low. 

Sansa hesitates, drawn out of the stupor he pulled her into, but she gets to her feet. She takes a step back as he unceremoniously yanks his pants down his legs. He is half-hard against his thigh. A low nervous swoop lands hot between her legs as she looks at him: he’s wide and long, everything about him big and intimidating.

Tormund pulls her back to him and she stumbles into his knees before he raises her back into his lap. He rests her hand, his over hers, against his inner thigh. She watches as his cock twitches. She can feel her mouth part open. “The blood flows fast here. Slit open and deep, dead in minutes.” His thigh is wide and muscular under her hand. Everything about him is unyielding and thick. A man you could break yourself against. 

“And it would be the same on me?” The voice that asks the question sounds nothing like her. It’s dark and curious and hungry. She can feel the deep breath he takes in, her gaze still fixed on her hand, his thigh. His cock.

His hand is wide as it covers her throat. He traces a line, same as the line Arya had cut in Littlefinger’s throat. She swallows; her breath comes that much faster. He drags his hand down to her collarbone and then her breast. He touches her over her robe. Her breast fits into his hand and her body sways minutely towards him when he passes a thumb over her nipple.

“Yes,” he says. 

His fingers are barely there as they draw a line down her middle, stopping at the apex of her thighs, where she is spread to sit his lap. Her entire body is trembling, with nerves and something worse, as he slips his hand between her legs. It’s him who makes a small sound, caught in his throat, when he finally touches her. Finds her wet. He pushes thick fingers through her folds but he does not breach her. He does not touch that part of her that makes her body clench and release. It is, she thinks, another way to tease her. 

But his impatience wins out, and he suddenly pushes her robe open and off of her. She is naked, as is he. His hand falls to her thigh and she stiffens as he touches the scarred skin. He does not mention them scars nor does he gentle his touch. She supposes scars are no surprise to a man like him, littered with them as he is. Like him, they are there, on her body, and he does not shy away from them. She cannot imagine him shying away from anything. 

He finally pushes his fingers into her, first one and then two, and she clings to him, her arms thrown around his shoulders. He dips his head and takes her breast into her mouth and she hears the bitten-off moan that escapes her mouth. Her body feels more her own than it has ever been at the same time it feels violently outside of her power. Each sound that spills from her mouth and each restless jerk of her hips he wrings from her feels as if it equally belongs to him as much as her. He is doing this to her. She reaches a hand up to his throat. His pulse gallops beneath her fingers. “Oh,” she hears herself say, the syllable broken into two, something within her to think she has affected him even a little.

Tormund’s fingers slip from her and he pulls her against him. Her cunt smears wetly over his cock and her hips rock down. He holds her still with a grunt.

“You will not think of him when I fuck you.” Her fingers curl into his shoulders and she looks down at him. She does not need to ask who he means.

“If you intend to control me, you will find yourself sorely disappointed.” Her voice is steadier than she expected. He notices, too. 

There is a dark light in his eyes as the width of his hand covers her thigh and he squeezes, tight. The muscle jumps beneath his grip. “It’s not control I speak of.” He reaches between their bodies and pumps his cock; she clenches emptily between her legs. “Go on then,” he says, conversational but for the roughness in his voice. “Get it over with.”

Sansa’s eyes widen despite herself. Each man before him, it was her body laid down on the bed and her legs parted open, her husband taking what he was told was his right. She wraps her fingers around him. He does nothing to help her. He lets her impale herself on him. 

The initial burn as she rocks down onto him is enormous. She hisses behind her teeth, every part of her taut and tense. “That’s it,” she hears him murmur, and then he rubs his fingers above where his cock is spreading her open. She gasps, a word or a name aborted into a rough noise, as she clutches around him and with a push of his hips his entire length is inside her. She squeezes her eyes shut. He grips the swell of her hip so tight that it hurts. “You have to move,” he finally says, as feral as she has ever heard him. Her eyes snap open and she begins to ride him, tentatively at first and then harder, demanding, breathless and wild. She aches around the stretch of him and if not for his hands on her hips she is certain she would lose her balance. 

She comes, and despite the build-up to it, it catches her by surprise. Her hair sticks sweat damp to the nape of her neck and spreads over his chest when he leans back onto the bed, dragging her with him. He fucks up into her, sharp and brutal, as he holds her in place. 

After he finishes, she pushes off of him. She struggles to get her breath back and her legs to stop shaking.

“No romance from you at all, huh, wife?” She does not miss the wide grin, smug and satisfied, on his face as he lays back naked on the bed.

 

 

 

 

Peace is slow work; Tormund, she learns, is not a patient man. Over the coming weeks, together they attempt to bridge the divide between their people. Throughout the process, he endures small council meetings mostly silent, a deep frown indented on his face, contributing little.

“You southerners love to talk,” he says late that evening. “You talk and you talk and you talk, and you get fucking nowhere.” He flops down onto the bed, half-dressed. Sansa paces. She finds herself restless each time she is alone with him, like a caged animal fearful not of him but herself. He has not touched her since their second night of marriage. If there is a test to be found in that, she thinks the performance and its success rests solely on her shoulders. He wants to draw her out. Of course he does, she thinks. He is a hunter; she will not let him believe her prey. 

“If peace is the goal, then talk is necessary.”

“Peace,” he all but spits. “It’s time spent waiting for battle.” He points in her direction. His body takes up most of the bed she can’t help but note. She does not know how she manages to sleep beside him. “It will come again and we best be prepared.”

“I am well aware of that.”

“You should let me kill this Bronn,” Tormund says suddenly. She looks up at him, startled. He only recently learned of everything, in great painful detail, that had transpired between Robin and Bran’s council. 

“You’d start a war,” she says.

“I’m good at war.”

“We married each other in the name of peace.”

“Peace for the North. This Bronn cunt’s no northerner.”

“We are nowhere near prepared to mount an assault on the South. What would we fight with? A dozen men?” She shakes her head. There’s more to it than that, but she has no desire to explain it to him. She does not think he would understand. She is tired of fighting. The specter of peace is so appealing, she wishes she could reach out and cup it in her hands, careful, as if made of the thinnest glass. She thinks there is safety to be found in that. It’s all she wants. It’s all she has wanted for a very long time—security. To know that she is protected, her family protected, that the things she has are her own and no one can take them away. There is no point in explaining any of that. “We will maintain the peace,” she says.

“Always peace you speak of,” he says. There is a note of what she wants to call mockery in his voice.

“It’s why you are here.”

“Is that why?” His mouth has gone liquid as he grins, his body lounged back in their bed against the furs. “Here I thought I was meant to fuck a line of princes and princesses into you.” Sansa presses her lips together in a flat line even as her body reacts to his words. She wonders if he can see that. If it’s why he says, “Come here,” with the dark confidence that she will. 

And she does. Maybe she wants to. She does not think of duty even as it provides an easy and distant sanctuary. If it is duty, then she is not responsible for what her body wants. What his body can do to hers. She had ached for days after that night with him. She felt hollowed out, like an opened wound, where even the brush of her clothing against her skin was enough to make her shiver. She had watched him carefully, the entire day after, her gaze fixing on his hands, the width and length of his fingers as both her body and mind recalled them between her legs where she felt an answering pulse. She dismissed both the thought and the memory over the following stretch of days, days that were followed by nights where she laid untouched beside him. Each time, despite the precedence established, was a surprise to her. She waited for him to reach for her, and he did not. Tormund wanted her, she knew that much. He was not a man to disguise himself and he wore that want openly, in the way his eyes tracked her in any room. In the way his body had responded to hers when he took her. 

But he wants her to want him as he wants her, she thinks. She realizes, as she approaches him. He wants her desperate. Sansa stands beside him and his eyes narrow in amusement.

“On the bed.” She kneels delicately beside him. She does not touch him. He does not touch her. He looks at her like he wants to say something but decides better of it. He is hunting her, she thinks, and her heart kicks against her breastbone. 

“Take off your robe.” Sansa takes a deep breath and then she does. He lays down and his eyes drag over her bared body. His hand wraps around her thigh and he pulls her to him. He is still dressed, but she can see him hardening against his trousers. She expects him to fuck her, here and now, and why wouldn’t he? It is why he is here, as he so eloquently explained. She swallows quickly; she is nowhere near ready to take him. She remembers all too clearly the burning stretch as he had first pushed into her, and that had been after he all but made her peak on his fingers. 

“Up here,” Tormund says, and she looks blankly at him. 

When she does not move, he drags her up his body, handling her as if she weighs nothing. He has her legs spread over his face. His beard scratches at her skin and she twitches. She tries to squirm away from him, entirely too self-conscious, but he holds her tight. Just as quickly as her cheeks flush with embarrassment and her mouth opens in protest, it doesn’t matter. His mouth is on her immediately, hot and demanding as he licks down the center of her. She groans hoarsely and grabs onto the sturdy wooden headboard, her legs splaying that much wider. His tongue is firm, wet and hot against where she is just as wet and hot. She feels filthy, exposed, her body straining against him, unsure just what she is chasing. It’s so different than when Jon had done this to her. Tormund’s mouth is like a challenge. As if he is not only seeking out her limits but just how far past them he can push her.

He makes her come twice like this—unrelenting, one peak rolling fluidly into the next, and she can barely hold herself up, Her thighs shake and try to close around his head. He’s noisy as he laps at her, eats at her, the sound of his tongue and mouth slick, mixed with his own grunts and groans. She clenches down on nothing as he sucks at her clit. 

“I need,” she gasps, without meaning to say anything.

“Mmm?” he hums against her and she jolts with it, an anguished broken sound catching in her throat.

She needs him inside of her. That’s what she means to say, but she cannot bring herself to make the words. Instead, with a trembling hand she disengages her fingers from around the headboard and curls them into his hair. He turns his face and bites at her thigh.

“Tell me,” he says against her skin. 

“I need,” she says again, the same embarrassment she felt when he first dragged her open and wet over his face. Her hips try to move but he holds her steady. “Inside me,” she finally manages to say. 

He presses a kiss on her inner thigh, the same spot he bit her, and she feels as if something is coming unstitched within her. She drags her hands over her face, and then he is moving her off of him. 

He gets her on her hands and knees and she freezes. She hears him rustling with his clothing behind her. Her body goes stiff; it will always be there, what was once done to her. 

“No?” she hears Tormund say softly. His hands gentle down her back, barely touching her.

“I’m fine,” she says. He pulls away from her.

“I’m not going to fucking make you,” he says. 

Sansa reaches back, blindly, for him. His cock. Any part of him she can touch. “I said I’m fine,” she snaps. “Fuck me.” The words are crude and clumsy in her mouth.

He laughs darkly, and then he does. He touches her lightly, but not as if she might break. As if he is giving her the opportunity to change her mind. It’s too considerate; she squeezes her eyes shut. She breathes deeply. When he fucks into her it is as if all the air is punched out of her at once. She groans, deep and guttural. Her breath feels funny in her chest, almost like she has been crying. Tormund stills at her back.

“Yes?” he says.

Sansa drops her head down into her arms. He is so deep like this. It should be impossible; she has never felt so full. “Please,” she says. “Yes.” The voice is that of a stranger’s, weak and thready and needy. Her legs have begun to shake again as she tries to push back onto him, make him fuck her.

“Good,” he says. 

He is quick with her, merciless. He comes with his mouth pressed to the bend of her shoulder, his teeth threatening to bite down. 

He rolls off of her and Sansa tries to catch her breath. She curls onto her side, her eyes still closed. She throbs between her legs. Curious, she reaches a hand down. She can feel his spend spilling out of her, wet on her thighs. Her cunt is sensitive, swollen to her hesitant touch. She opens her eyes to find him watching her hungrily. His eyes are dark, fixed on her face and not the hand between her legs. She does not look away. She cannot be caught, she irrationally wants to tell him. She starts to rub at herself, tentatively, too sensitive for much pressure. Despite that, she comes again quickly, quietly, a pale imitation of the pleasure he had given her. Tormund reaches for her and takes her hand in his. He brings it to his mouth and he licks her fingers clean, the only sound his mouth on her and the sharp breath she sucks in. After, he lays back on the bed.

“You are a lot of work, Wolf Queen. You wear me out.”

 

 

 

 

In the Great Hall, they receive their subjects. Sansa sits tall, her spine straight and precise while Tormund reclines beside her. His body dwarfs her own despite his slumped posture. He sits in the throne they had carved for Gendry. She remembers how small Sweetrobin had looked seated in that bloody chair. With Tormund, you don’t even notice the throne. Only him. 

She looks out on the gathered lords, the smallfolk and the Free Folk alike. A clear divide remains between the two groups, hers and his, and they have yet to commingle and coexist. Sansa is reminded of when Jon once stood in this Hall and they named him the King in the North. Tormund and his men had sat along the window and she had watched them, their guarded curiosity and open respect as Jon’s men took the knee.

She cannot find that respect on their faces now. They look to her as if they do not believe she has earned her seat. 

She listens to a dispute involving shares of grain and a quoted price between a Northern farmer and a clan of the Free Folk. Straightforward enough, she thinks. She decides in favor of the Northern farmer, levying the demand of fair payment or equal kind in trade to be determined by her court if need be.

One of the Free Folk—Hygard, she believes his name to be—spits onto the stone floor before her. Her teeth sink into the inside of her bottom lip. She breathes deeply and evenly. 

“I have ruled in the interest of fairness. If that is not satisfactory to you then I suggest you find a different farm or a different good to share.”

“You rule in favor of your men. There is no justice in that.”

Her face dips into a slight frown. “In this case, he is the party in the right.”

He sucks at his teeth as if he aims to spit again. She will not let herself look to Tormund beside her. She can’t decide which is worse—for him to intervene of if he is to keep quiet.

“You’ve got no claim on me, wolf bitch,” he says. Her fingers curl into the arms of her throne. Hardly the worst epithet levied against her, but when the men gathered in the Great Hall begin to laugh, the sound stifled but hideous, cruel, she feels her cheeks flare. She feels that familiar anger inside of her stoke into a roaring flame. 

“I am your Queen, as I am wed to your King.”

“You think because you ride his cock you got any power over the rest of us?” More of that awful susurration of pointed laughter fills the Hall.

“Shut the fuck up, Hygard. Pay the price or return the grain. The decision has been made,” Tormund says. She jerks her head towards him. His face still wears that active disinterest he applies to each doing of her court. 

Hygard make an exaggerated bow, his body bent in half, and he sweeps his arms back up. “Aye, King Tormund,” he says.

 

 

 

 

“When I asked for your cooperation, that was scarcely what I had in mind.” Sansa storms into their bedchamber, her slighted pride and her fury building upon each other unsteadily within her. 

“I warned you—the Free Folk do not take kindly to Kings and Queens.”

“He listened to you, didn’t he?”

“To spite you.” Tormund looks as if he might smile, and Sansa acts before she thinks. She slaps him across the face. He smiles in full now and he laughs, the sound bitter and amused. She reaches to smack him again and he grabs her by the wrist.

“That’s it. You take it out on me. I can take it. Give it to me.”

That heated rage that lives inside of her feels blanketed suddenly. There is someone, finally, who not only recognizes all of that anger she possesses but is willing to receive it. She stills before she hits him again. This time, it is barely a pat on his cheek. She does not remove her hand and he leans into it. His tongue darts out and he licks at his mouth until his lips are shining and wet. He does not move a muscle. He waits her out. 

Sansa leans forward and she presses her mouth to his. She snags her teeth on his bottom lip and he growls. His tongue is hot and thick in her own mouth and she opens hungrily to him. 

Later that night, both well-exhausted by each other. Tormund’s hand scrapes down the scarred length of her upper thigh. Down and up, up and down. Ramsay only marked her right thigh. He told her he wanted her other clean—“pretty,” he called it. A reminder of what a beautiful lady would look like it if wasn’t her. If it wasn’t for him.

“You said you fed him to dogs.”

“I did.”

Tormund’s hand stills. The way he has it positioned, only the edges of the scar tissue can be seen outside the span of his hand. “Good.”

 

 

 

 

“Be firm with them.” Tormund’s head is lowered as he pulls on his boots. The morning light slants through the window weak and gray. “The Free Folk, they like strength. They want a warrior, even if you do not fight in battle. They want to know you will fight for them.”

“Easy enough,” she says sourly as her mouth turns down. 

“For you? Yes. You are already strong.”

She looks to his retreating back in surprise.

 

 

 

 

As the months stretch on Sansa devotes much of her attention, when not restlessly focused on the South, to her attempts to restructure the farming collectives of the North. For most of her life she gave little thought to the strict social hierarchy she had been born into—the lords in their castles and keeps for generations upon generations and the smallfolk who worked the land. Somewhere in her travels, from Winterfell to King’s Landing, from the Eyrie to the Wall, she learned that much of the world as she understood it was a cruel burden to the people who had to live in it. It is difficult to unmake and remake a system, least of all as winter rages on, but she is trying, small and tentative her steps may be. She pores over maps of the North endlessly, redrawing the lines as they have long been known, much to the dismay of her Northern lords who express little more than betrayed dismay at the idea of ceding any land to be owned rather than worked by the smallfolk.

“Independence has long been the backbone of the Northern spirit,” she told her council when Lord Overton first expressed great dislike to her plans. “Why not apply it, to a degree, to our people?”

Her ambitions must be broadened now as she has to grant some of the land to the Free Folk as well, now that she is their Queen. She finds herself politicking in full force as she works hard not to offend the new family who has taken residence at Deepwood Motte as she chips away at some of their lands. As a result of the thin line she must walk, the Free Folk get less than she first promised. 

The council room empties that evening until it is just her and Tormund. She gets to her feet. She is tired. She should see to Lyanna before she is put to bed.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Tormund says. He is still seated at the table. He taps his fingers lightly against the surface. “I wonder if it was independence you truly wanted for the North or if you just wanted it under your rule. It must always, always be your way, no one else’s.”

Sansa’s hands curl into fists at her side. “I don’t know what it is you think you mean to say, but I would advise caution.”

“You’d advise me caution.” He shakes his head. “You lied to me. To my people.”

She barely resists rolling her eyes. Battle-tested Tormund may be but he is completely naive when it comes to the ways of court and the art of diplomacy. “That’s politics.”

“No. No, I don’t do that. I do not fucking lie.”

“You are a King. I regret to inform you, politics is at least half the job.”

“It is not the deal we had.”

“And what deal is that?”

He gets to his feet.

“I do not lie to you. And you will not lie to me.” Sansa says nothing and he comes closer to her. “Politics,” and he says the word with the distaste and disgust he never applies to the profanity that regularly leaves his mouth, “will fall solely to you.”

“Part of politics is that promises will be made that cannot always be kept. That is not a lie. That is a change in circumstance that I must rise to meet.”

“Did you know when you told Borys and his clan they’d have that land that you’d go back on it just as quick?” Sansa pauses. She had known. Of course she had known. It was an empty promise when she made it. It must show in her face, or he must have gotten that good at reading her, because his own drops down into a sneer. 

“I agreed to be here,” he says. Snarls. “And I have agreed to your wishes. But do not cross this line of mine again, wife. I have no interest in your games.”

“Or you’ll do what?”

She waits for it. What she has always known of men. When challenged, it’s always the same. Threats, then violence.

“I will leave you,” he says. “A marriage like this can mean nothing to the Free Folk if I allow it. Your vows will not shackle me to a liar.”

It chills her, crashing up against actual power. Despite the uncertainty she feels, she stands firm. “I cannot always tell the truth,” she says quietly.

“No. I suppose not. How does a Queen manipulate otherwise?” Her mouth twitches. She wants to ask him how he expects her to unlearn each and every terrible lesson she was forced to learn to make it this far. To stay alive. Honesty, trust—they lost you your head, much like her father. Honesty put a mark on you. They thought you a fool. Tormund has lived a very different life than she, and while he may be well-versed in war and conquest, she knows how to play the same on a very different battlefield, her weapons her tongue and her intellect. 

“I do not manipulate you.” He wants honesty—there, have some. 

“You have tried.” Has she? Is the instinct that natural in her that she does it, same as breathing? In order to get what you want, you must first trick a man. How many have strived to teach her that? Maybe she has tried. Maybe she has worked hard to convince him he has just as much to gain from their marriage as she while knowing the opposite to be true. “You do with my people,” he says.

“Our people.”

“They’re not.” Real anger has bloomed in his face. “You do not care for my people, not as you do your own. You think you can throw us a bone and a scrap and we will be happy enough with that. You still call the North yours when what it is now is ours.”

“I am still learning, My King,” she says. A misstep; she knows it as soon as she says it. 

Tormund comes even closer, the heat of his body flush with hers. He takes her jaw in his hand. “You are trying to manipulate me now, wife.” Her hips hit the back of the table. “My Queen.” He smoothes his thumb over her lips and her breath staggers. He pulls back from her just as suddenly. She resists the urge to slump against the table. 

She watches him at the door, his back to her as he reaches for the knob. “I don’t lie, or I do not do it to be cruel.” Tormund stills. He begins to turn to face her. “Don’t turn around,” she says quickly. It’s easier to speak to him like this. Honesty feels the same as reaching inside her body and tearing out a bone, a vital organ, to show him. It is ugly, and she would rather not look at him as she does it. “It is what I was taught. It is how power is exerted. King’s Landing was a nest of lies. And when I escaped from there, the lies I was told and the lying I was taught were that much more insidious and monstrous. If I have lied, if I have manipulated as you claim, it is to achieve what I need to be done. It is because I saw no other way.” She swallows quickly. “You asked for honesty and I give it: I am still learning. To be a Queen, and to be a wife.” Her voice quavers slightly on the last word. Five times a wife over, and she is only now learning what it means to share, to have a partner.

Tormund looks at her over his shoulder. He opens the door before him. 

“Do not lie to me again,” he says.

 

 

 

 

The mornings Tormund awakens before she does, he goes to the window in their bed chamber. He unlatches the shutters and opens the thick glass inward. On these mornings, she wakes to a rush of cold air, the smell of snow. He stands there, naked, before the open window and she watches him breathe deeply. 

“The cold’s not right, this far South.” He has said that to her on more than one occasion.

“Why not?” Sansa yields this time and asks him, still slow with sleep, the furs heavy and near warm enough on her body. He always seems to know when she is awake, even if he no longer is in bed with her.

“No bite to it,” he says. “No point to anything without the fear it might chew through you till it hits bone.”

Their relationship, both as King and Queen and as husband and wife, deepens and develops over the intervening months. Most of it, shockingly to her, is predicated on sex. They fuck constantly. He draws it out, makes it last, shows her how ruthless he can be. It’s enough to make her near pity any man who crossed him in battle. He takes quickly her when she is snappish and impatient, wakes her with his mouth on more than one occasion. Sansa tries to be open with him about her plans and her agendas, her ideals and her hopes for the North, but it is far easier to be open with her body. It surprises her, how she is learning, relearning, her own body. The only real pleasure she had known were moments stolen with Jon, fleeting and caught up in too much complicated history and emotion. This is entirely different. 

She can almost allow herself to believe it is simple. 

Tormund makes the thought easy for her. He wears lust so easily and without any shame for making his wants known. He will look at her sometimes, as a feast drags on, as Northmen and Free Folk alike come before them seeking justice or mercy, as he endures a small council meeting, and she will know exactly what he is thinking. Eyes dark and fixed on her, making his possession of her known without even touching her. 

But it’s not only herself she learns—it is him as well. He likes to watch her touch herself as he pulls at himself. He likes when she slips her fingers into his mouth and lets him suck on them. He likes to push deep into her and stay, rocking over, against and into her, telling her all manner of filth, his mouth pressed hot against her ear. He imagines fucking her on the table of the small council, all of her councillors there to watch and witness. He imagines parting her naked thighs as she sits on her pretty little throne while he eats her pretty little cunt. He imagines, always, people watching, knowing, what he does to her. He likes to know what she wants as well and he demands she impart her own imaginings in kind. It is only when she is at her most desperate, her hungriest, when she is so close and her thighs slip against his ribs, that she will tell him. She wants him to hold her down so she cannot move and she cannot see the rest of the world, she wants him on his knees, she wants him constantly—a fact she confesses breathlessly and immediately wishes to retract. Tormund says nothing, only a wordless growl as he comes inside her, her own mouth opening in an answering snarl. He makes an animal of her. 

As the months pass though her belly remains flat, a fact that does not pass without mention.

“You’re still not with child, despite your best efforts,” Lady Dustin says to her. 

“My best efforts?” 

Lady Dustin’s eyes light with the eagerness attached to an unspent secret. “They have managed to keep the gossip from you then.”

“What gossip?” Sansa snaps.

Lady Dustin arranges her hands primly in her lap. “It is said you and your Wilding husband couple like wolves in heat.”

Sansa’s cheeks flush in embarrassment. 

Her attempts to keep quiet in the bedchamber last only a night. Her thighs shake, her teeth bite into her bottom lip, until Tormund finally pulls his mouth away from her cunt. “You do not want to tonight?”

She frowns. “What? Yes. Why?”

“You’re like a little mouse, not a peep out of you.”

She gestures towards the door. “They can hear us,” she hisses. 

She knows that look on his face now. She has learned it the hard way. He has found a dare and he wishes to meet it. He leans forward and the long lick of his tongue presses flat against her cunt. He deliberately maintains eye contact with her. He does it again until she makes a sound, caught and hot in the back of her throat. “Good,” he says.

She likes it best when he nears his peak, when he begins to forget himself, forget her, and his grip tightens painfully on her body. When he fucks and ruts that much harder into her, making her ache, the both of them feral and she will bare her throat to him. 

Tormund catches on easily. “Of course the wolf likes it rough,” he says, smugly, to her once. After. Normally she wriggles near immediately from his grasp, but as of late she lets her body drape and lay alongside his. She knows if she thinks about it, if she assigns it motive or emotion, then she is responsible for it. So she does neither. 

Sometimes she thinks that she is wrong, that he does not forget himself with her. He does not forget her. It is another thing she cannot let herself dwell on, but if she were to, she knows what she would find. He often looks at her with a clarity that frightens her.

 

 

 

 

Sansa sees her daughter in the mornings and the evenings. She leaves her education to the Septa, same as her mother had done with her and Arya. She tries to remember how Catelyn had served as a mother. She mostly finds her memory fuzzy and compromised. All she can remember is that she was there. She was there until she needed her most. She does not know how to be there for Lyanna. The girl confounds her, messy and busy and curious. She looks so much of Jon. Sansa can’t help but think it each time she drags her fingers through the girl’s tangled dark curls.

Lyanna, Sansa fast learns, is drawn to the other Free Folk children who now populate the grounds of Winterfell. She is a scrappy thing, the palms of her hands and her knees constantly raw and scraped. There is a fight in her, a temper, different than the one that lives in Sansa. 

She holds her daughter’s hand as they watch the men practice in the yard below, swords raised and they clack noisily together on impact. Tormund is among the men below, drilling both the Free Folk and the Northmen. His style of fighting is so different from the knights that she has known and seen; she tries to picture him crashing through a tourney, his battle-ax raised and has to bite down on an unbidden grin. What she would have at first called a lack of elegance she now recognizes as something else. There is grace to be found in his brutality. At the start, she had kept Lyanna from Tormund. Not out of fear, but a far baser instinct. She was her daughter, she was another man’s daughter, and despite everything he told her she did not fully trust him. Not with her. Now, she glances down at her daughter only to be met by her rapt, focused attention as Tormund easily deflects a Northman’s parry and raises his ax to his neck.

Tormund must see them, because that night as they settle into bed together he says to her, “Y’know, it’s never too early to learn.”

She looks to him with confusion. “Learn what?”

“To fight, of course.”

She settles back against the furs, tired. She watches him as he blows out the candles. “And who is learning to fight?”

“Lyanna,” he says.

 

 

 

 

The relative peace they have achieved between their people shatters so easily. 

Sansa is out in the yard, discussing a grain shipment, when it happens. First, there is a garbled shout and then the hot splash of blood on her face and neck as Sansa is knocked to her knees, her body landing with a jarring thud. Someone pushes her down, until her chest is flush against the dirt-packed ground. She can smell the blood on her, and for a confused and panicked moment she believes it to be her own. But when she glances to her right, she sees her. Beth Cassel, sprawled out, an arrow pierced through her long neck. 

She sucks in a wheezing, horrified gasp and tries to look up. It’s Wylla’s body draped over her own, attempting to shield her. There are shouts from the parapet and Wylla keeps saying urgently, “Do not look, Your Grace.”

“Is she dead?” she hears herself nonsensically ask.

“Do not look, Your Grace,” Wylla says. 

The quiet is just as sudden as the violence. Wylla’s grip on her lessens and Sansa is able to push her off, rise to her feet. The front of her dress is smeared with mud and Beth’s blood. She looks around, and she understands immediately why they all have gone quiet. The entire yard stills for her, it slips away, as she catches sight of Tormund across the yard. His face is stricken and pale, his mouth tight. His attention is fixed above, on the man they caught, his bow and quiver wrestled from him. 

“I want him alive,” Tormund calls, and then he glances across the yard to her. He breathes deeply as he looks at her, his gaze traveling over the blood still smeared on her face and neck. “Get her out of here.”

“I’m fine,” Sansa says.

He addresses Wylla. “I said get her out of here. And see to the princess.” He gestures towards Inga. “Go with them.”

“I said I am fine.”

Tormund stalks towards her. He grabs her by the chin and his fingers smear through Beth's blood. His face is thunderous now and he jerks her head, makes her look down at Beth’s body. “You see that? But for the grace of the gods and the forethought of your lady there that would be you.” He releases her chin and he presses two fingers to her breast. There is a brief tremble to them that is gone just as quick as she saw it. “You’re the fucking Queen, aren’t you? You’re useless to everyone as a corpse.” Fury has set his teeth on edge; Sansa does not think she has ever seen him this close to losing his control. “Go with them. We will come for you when your castle is secure.”

Inga grabs Sansa by the arm. “She will be safe. Come.”

 

 

 

 

It is not so much a trial they give the traitor but a public interrogation. 

In the Great Hall, Sansa and Tormund are seated on their thrones. The captured man is on his knees before them, his hands bound behind his back. Lyanna is secure in her chambers with the Septa and guards stationed outside her door, Inga among them. 

“I’d like to know what your plan was here, trying to kill the Queen in the North,” Tormund says. His tone is flat and all the more intimidating for it, ferocity threatening below the surface. 

“To take back what is ours. The fucking North.”

“Take what is ours?” Tormund repeats. He gets to his feet and he steps forward. “You have nothing but disdain for them, but you speak so like them now. The kneelers.”

He spits at Tormund’s boots as he comes closer. “You are a false king,” he says, his hatred warping his voice into a low rasp. “A Southron lord now, not a true man of the North. Not a man at all.” Tormund does not react to the insults. “You let that whore break you.” There is no immediate reaction out of Tormund, but then she hears it—the creak of leather as he raises his arm and pummels the prisoner’s face quick and easy.

“None of that disrespect. We haven’t the time for it.” Tormund stares down at the man. “I ask you once, the names of the men who agreed to your foolish little plan.”

He stares up at Tormund defiantly. “The only foolish plan we had was to follow you.”

Tormund’s mouth spreads slowly into a smile. “Killing kings and queens is serious business, and you? You are here, on your knees. You are not good at it. You should have stuck to following me, false king or otherwise. For now, you leave me with a decision to make. An easy death, or something far worse. You have a final choice to make, too. Guide this King’s hand and tell me. What are their names?”

Sansa steels herself, her breathing deep and even. The man does not answer. 

“You think you have chosen bravery and that is honorable. Fine. Remember that, cling to it, while I work.”

Tormund unsheathes his blade, the _whick_ of metal on leather loud in the silent Hall.

“You will give me names, boy,” he says softly. And he does. The names are shrieked from a ruined mouth. Sansa watches, each miserable, blood-soaked step of the way. She does not stop Tormund. She does not speak. She allows him to exert his authority in both her name and his. 

Tormund silences the traitor’s final gurgling breath as he lays on the cold floor. He spends his last blood, and Sansa watches, the dark spread of it, black as shadow, as it sinks into the cracks of the gray stone. Tormund rises, his blade dripping thick. He nods to her. 

She stands. She is met with a delayed clatter as the rest of the Hall rises to their feet as well. The following silence has a shape to it, dense and smothering. 

“I am your Queen. He is your King. Betrayal will result in only one fate,” she says, her voice loud and clear. It does not bely the rapid beating of her heart, the way her breath catches in her throat. “Think hard on your next actions and harder still on the allegiances you swear. Remember your first and most important promise: the North. The North does not forget.”

She exits the Hall. She is flanked by her ladies and her guards alike, and she waves them off. It is only when she is alone that she takes a shuddering breath in and holds her hand to her throat. 

 

 

 

 

Tormund leaves that evening on a planned hunt with the Free Folk after the other named traitors are executed. A pall settles over Winterfell and Sansa does not see him before he goes. She watches his departure from the North tower. She watches as he glances back once at Winterfell, and then he rides. She wonders if Jon is waiting where he goes. She wonders if he will tell her or if he requires her to ask after him specifically. Tormund does not lie, he has made that much abundantly clear, but he does not always give the truth without prompting. 

“He did not wish to go,” Inga says behind her. Sansa turns around too quickly. “The King,” Inga says, as if clarity was what Sansa needs.

“Why not? The hunt has been planned for weeks.”

“He did not say.”

“I can handle myself. I have for some time now.”

“I am sure the King knows this.” Inga says the words _the King_ as if it costs her greatly to do so. Sansa does not make any concessions for her. In her presence, Tormund is the King. He shall be referred to as such. “It unsettled him some that the Free Folk would act so brazenly against you.”

“They killed my husband, the King,” Sansa says sharply. “Did that not shock him as well?”

“Aye, they killed that King. They did not come for you.” Inga’s eyes narrow. “He thinks you nigh untouchable. It is a curious thing.”

“His faith in me?” The question comes out acidic and harsh even as the thought twists something hard enough to ache inside of her.

“The fierceness of it.” Inga clasps her hands behind her back. “In his absence, I will keep an eye on the Free Folk here at Winterfell. Your Grace,” she hastily adds.

“Thank you,” Sansa says, distracted. She turns back to the window, but he has already slipped past the horizon.

 

 

 

 

Tormund returns from the hunt after a fortnight.

He is dirty and tired, his legs caked with mud and old snow, his eyes more heavily lined than she recalls. She watches him swing down from his horse, direct his men and the bounty they have brought back with them. Sansa wants to grab him, pull him to her and not let go; she all but recoils from the instinct. Instead she stands there, rigid and distant, and waits for him to come to her. 

In his absence, she thought of him near constantly. The blade in his hand, the blood, his effortless defense of her. It had required no forethought from him, no debate. A challenge to her—both her title and her very existence—and he was on his feet. People did not protect each other, not even with the best of intentions. She knows that, to the very core of her being. But she had trusted him. She trusted him to kill the traitor and to unearth the others who followed his cause. And he had.

“Wife,” he says when he reaches her.

Sansa used to think of her life as neatly cleaved in half. The time when she had belonged to others, her family, the love they sheltered each other under—and then, after. Alone. Now, she is scarcely so cleanly divided. She had realized, in the time spent in their bed chamber alone, as the nights passed slow and cold, that she has come to think Tormund the same way she has thought of Jon for all these years: with a wild drumbeat of panic in her breast that he can be taken from her. That she has built a life, both with and around, him. If he is taken from her, she will be lost again. She will be alone. She cannot decide which course of action she longs for more—to cut him off now, cauterize the wound, and find safety in the cold she knew before. There is no sense of control in sharing yourself like this. Or she can bend to him. Fit her body against his and demand, as his Queen and as his wife, that he never leave her side. 

She trusts him. It’s unbearable. “I am glad for your return,” she tells him, her tone formal and cold.

 

 

 

 

That night, when she enters their bedchamber, Tormund is already there. Sansa has said little to him since his return, and now, still without speaking, she approaches him. 

He frowns, though amusement is evident in his face. “It’s good to see you, too,” and he stops, mid-sentence and he watches her carefully. She pushes lightly at his shoulder for him to sit on the edge of the bed.

His frown deepens, but he yields. He sits, and, efficiently, she begins to undress him. She is silent, her face pulled tight. He has bathed since and she can still smell the soap on him. Her demeanor must be off enough because confusion is written plainly across his face. He places a hand on her wrist and stills her.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

She shakes out of his grip; “What does it look like?” she says and she resumes undressing him. Pushes his clean tunic off of him and to the floor. “Do not speak to me,” she says. His mouth twists, but he obeys. She is in the grip of her own madness of a kind. She is frightened of what she wants from him, frightened by what she wants to do to him. She wants her hands, her mouth, on him. The name for the things she feels sits dangerously on the tip of her tongue and she wishes to deny it. If they speak now, she may say its name. She cannot risk it.

Tormund’s body is familiar to her now. She has learned him well. This is dangerous, too. She goes to remove his pants and she can feel him already hardening against the inside of her forearm.

She gets to her knees between his legs.

“I never thought to ask if you would kneel for me,” he says. The dark humor in his voice does nothing to dispel the tension that has ratcheted up between them.

Sansa lifts her gaze to him. He’s hard now and she can feel an answering pulse between her legs. “I said do not speak to me.”

She takes him in her mouth. She has never done this to a man before. She is clumsy with it, uncertain, but she takes his reactions as her cues. He tastes like flesh and heat, bitter and salty as he leaks onto her tongue. Her jaw aches near immediately as she opens wider to accommodate him. She is sloppy and unpracticed; she can feel her own spit slick down her chin. She can hear the low rumble of sound, as if it travels up from his chest to his throat to his lips. Her face flushes as she gags, takes him too deep too quickly. His fingers catch in her hair and stroke at her cheek where he can feel himself. He’s noisy, but wordless. She rests a hand on his thigh and she can feel the muscle quivering beneath. She trembles with a flare of power at that; she can make him come as undone as he makes her. 

Tormund pushes her face back suddenly. A string of spit connects her mouth to his cock. It is the most obscene thing she has ever seen. Her mouth is swollen and her tongue traces the rim of her bottom lip. Tormund exhales noisily, a wild look in his eyes.

“This what you wanted from me?” His voice is breathy despite the mocking tone. She realizes now they both have their own defense mechanisms. He may not lie to her, but he hides himself beneath his humor, his bluster. She shifts her eyes to his cock rather than his face.

“Yes,” she hears herself say. “I think of it often.”

He takes a rough breath in. His cock twitches. “Sucking me off?”

“Your cock,” she says, each word deliberate and careful though she blushes as she says it. “I don’t think it’s very fair,” she pauses. She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She can still taste him; his cock pulses in her tightening grip. “That you can make me feel like this.”

He groans. “Like what?”

“You make me desperate. You make me want.” She briefly takes the tip of his cock into her mouth and he hisses. “You make me frightened of myself.” Her tongue traces down the length of him. “Like I could just fall apart. It’s not fair.”

“Stop,” he says, out of breath.

“I don’t want to,” Sansa says. He reaches down and strokes over her wet mouth with the pad of his thumb. 

“You want me to come down your throat, Wolf Queen?”

She pulls out his grasp and mouths at his cock again.

“You never say my name,” she says, her head bowed. The fact never occurred to her until now. She can’t ever remember her name in his mouth, her name said with his voice. 

Tormund pulls her back again, this time by her hair. It makes her scalp sting and she just barely bites down on a sharp gasp. “And you never call me by mine.”

He yanks her up his body and they both hurriedly undress her. He gets her beneath him, facedown in the furs as she tries to lift herself up. He presses his body against her back. He murmurs, “Sansa, Sansa,” into her hair, her throat, her spine. He groans loudly when he feels how wet she is for him. Her hips buck down, pushing her cunt against his hand. She expects him to fuck her like this, but he turns her over to her back. He looks her in the eye when he breaches her, and she cries out, she leans into him. She arches her throat and his beard scratches at her thin skin. Because that is her problem with him, isn’t it? Her skin is too thin, he brings everything in her too close to the surface. His mouth covers hers and her teeth scrape along his bottom lip. She can taste blood, and so must he, because he growls, because he fucks her that much harder, makes her ache, makes her moan into his mouth. His control is finally slipping, and he is rough with her—the heated width of his hand as it clutches tight enough to bruise at first her hip and then her thigh, the force of his body forcing her down into the bed. His teeth bite into the tight tendon of her neck and she can feel the sound she makes even if she does not hear it. She thinks of the Hall, the blood, the easy, terrible violence of it. Of him, his face stark and without mercy. Of him, as hers. When she comes, she sees red.

 

 

 

 

Jon visits Winterfell not long after. He had heard of the plot by the Free Folk against her and he wanted to come, he says, as a gesture of further peace and to assure her that these men had been nothing more than outliers. He does not come alone and there is a formality to his arrival Sansa finds difficult to reconcile with him. It’s Jon. This was once his home.

She treats him with the same misplaced formality he grants her. She ignores the open pain on his face when he sees Lyanna. She calls him Uncle Jon and his grin is shaky but wide as he speaks with her. Beside her, Tormund is uncharacteristically silent.

It is not until late in the day that she is finally alone with him. She has Jon brought to her solar and all but regrets it once he enters. She no longer knows how to occupy a room with him. She does not know how they are meant to share a space now.

His face is sullen, even suspicious, as he looks to her. “You could have told us you were coming,” she finally says. “We’ve done little in the way of preparation.”

“I don’t require much.”

“No,” she says, and then she cannot resist. “More than I can offer.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t do that. I did not come here to fight.”

“Then we will not fight,” she says blithely.

“You’ve changed,” Jon says after a pause.

Her mouth lifts, less of a smile and more of a smirk. “You say that as if picking a fault in me.”

“No fault. It’s just, Tormund does not tell me these things when he and I speak.”

“Perhaps to him I have not changed.” Jon says nothing. “You speak of me with him?”

“Of course. I ask after you, and Lyanna, and he tells me. He used to tell me more, about you, at the beginning. He’s quieter about you now.”

Warmth fills her chest and her face that is doused just as quickly. It never escapes her mind that Jon could have been the King at her side. There is so much they might have had if only he was willing. That is not a hurt that repairs, easily or at all. Maybe that is why she says it. “I imagine he has little interest in detailing to you how he fucks me.”

The word _fuck_ manages to be both casual and awkward in her mouth. Jon looks at her with a shocked offense she does not think she has ever managed to pull from him before. She has made him feel so many things in the life they have shared, good and bad and unendurable, but this is new. 

“See. You have changed.”

“I suppose it was inevitable.”

He offers her a small smile before his face falls back into his usual serious countenance. Sad. He’s always been sad, she thinks. “Are you happy now?”

Her tongue clicks in her mouth as she opens it yet finds herself unsure what to say. “You ask me that as if it matters.”

“It should. I would like it to. I’d like you to be happy. Tormund is.”

His name feels like a weapon between them. “Did he tell you that?”

“He’s a fairly open book.”

“I’ve noticed.” She looks to him. “Are you happy?”

“Sansa,” he says. Sighs.

“You have not found happiness in the punishment you give yourself?” Cold has edged into her voice and it scrapes over the both of them. 

“You mock me?”

“I miss you,” she says. 

He shakes his head. “After,” and Jon pauses, bereft. “After I did what I did, I asked Tyrion if it was the right thing. He told me to ask him again in ten years. Hard to believe, but it’s coming close, and I have spent the years asking myself that same question over and over again. I only ever arrive at the same answer.” His eyes are baleful when he raises them to meet hers. 

Sansa bites the inside of her cheek. “And how might it have ended, where might we be now, if you had let a conqueror and her dragon continue to stamp their way north across the continent? I am certain that I for one would be dead by now.”

“A conqueror?” Jon says sadly. 

“That is the question you ask yourself, but you know what I wonder? How different things might have been if I had gone to Dragonstone in your stead.”

“You would’ve done better than me?”

“I would have done different.”

“You wouldn’t have bent the knee, you mean.” This conversation has built for years, she thinks. Like a black abscess that has lived, shared, between the both of them. Never healing but growing wider, deeper. The past cannot be fixed. She knows this. But how they live with it—

“No. I would not have.”

“And how does this happy tale end, Sansa? Are we all drafted into the Night King’s army?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? These questions all have the same answers. Nothing. There is nothing that can be changed. What’s done is done. What you did, it’s done.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me! What don’t I understand?”

“I am always going to love her, and I am always going to hate myself for what I did to her.” It is almost a relief to hear him finally say it out loud.

“You think I can’t understand that? Jon.” A bitter laugh escapes her mouth. “I am always going to love you.” Each word she says is bitten off and sharp. “You are a part of me as much as the North is in me, and as much as both try to break me, I will go on loving you. I know no other way.”

“I don’t deserve your love.”

“I don’t care. You have it.” She looks away from him. A door has long stood open where she and Jon are concerned. It is an exit, and she knows now, soon she will walk through it. 

“We will never be together,” she says quietly, as if the thought is just now occurring to her. Despite the finality she feels, she wants to know when she lost him. She wants it drawn out for her, as clearly delineated as the maps of Westeros. She wants to know if there is a fixed point in all that time she could return to, armed with the knowledge of how to keep him. Knowledge, she thinks, she still lacks. She’ll always lack.

“No,” he says. “We won’t.”

 

 

 

 

“I thought you’d be pleased to see him.”

Sansa quickly glares at Tormund over her shoulder. She lashes her robe tighter around herself and ignores the spread of his body in their bed.

“I am,” she says.

He snorts. “Sure got a funny way of showing it.” She ignores him. “I come from happy people,” he continues. “I don’t understand yours.”

Sansa stills. She rarely bothers to consider the life he left to join hers. It’s selfish, she knows. She thinks, when it comes to Tormund, only what he has gained from their marriage. No wonder he paces this place some nights like a leashed animal. No wonder he throws their window wide open first thing in the morning. 

“We know happiness,” she says sharply all the same.

“I have seen very little of it then.”

“You have known us in times of war and this never-ending winter besides.”

He scoffs. “I knew your lot before all that. The crows sent Beyond the Wall? Grim-faced boys who wanted little more than a fight they couldn’t win. Came dragging their blades in the snow and a neck for the gallows.”

“Was Jon one of those boys?” She thinks back to him earlier this evening, suffering under the weight of his self-described failures. He has told her so little of the part of his life he shared with Tormund, before she found him. Of any part of his life, come to think. They crashed back together only to be interrupted by the constant drumbeat of war. The Boltons at Winterfell, the dead Beyond the Wall. Cersei in King’s Landing. 

Daenerys.

“Yes and no. He was a surly little thing, fucking coat bigger than the boy in it. Same for the longsword.” He laughs to himself quietly. “Part of me wanted to see him unsheathe it just to see if he’d fall on his ass with it.” He returns his gaze to her. “He came not for blood, but deception, and for all he made a fucking mess of everything then I’m damned glad I didn’t skewer him through that first day.”

She looks at him curiously. Just as Jon had known Father differently than she did, Tormund knows Jon differently.

“He lied to you?”

“Aye, he lied.” Tormund sighs, heavy and tired. “So stubborn, all in the name of his duty. And fucking honor.”

Sansa does not know what to do with the look on his face. She doesn’t want hear him name each thing he has ever lost. She thinks if he did, he would say a name she says all too often to herself. “Well, what do you expect from a Stark?”

“You fucking southerners,” he says, not unkindly. “You say these names as if they’re binding. He has this name, so he must become that man. He is Stark, but he was born Targaryen baby king. It’s foolish.”

“It matters,” she snaps. She turns to face him. “Family dictates the type of person a man can become.” That loneliness, that for so long dogged her every step, returns to her now. She hadn’t even noticed that it was missing until now. “It matters,” she says again.

A slight frown deepens on Tormund’s face. “It would be easier, if it was him.” He says it objectively, no self-pity or any bait to be found in it. He is not trying to start a fight. It only makes her want to argue with him, see it from the other side.

“Jon the Queenslayer. Jon the last Targaryen. Jon, a bastard of Winterfell.” She begins to pace. “He would have presented his own challenges.”

“Not for you.”

“Yes, for me. He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to be here. With me. There is no love to be gained in forcing him.”

“He loves you. I know that, and so do you.”

“And it’s not enough for him.” She will never say out loud: _I am not enough for him_. I am not enough to erase the past. To pardon him.

Tormund’s face is solemn. His eyes fix on her. She meets his with as much defiance as she has left in her. “His loss,” he says. The fight goes out of her.

She spent so long in the early days of their marriage wishing for Jon. She had hoped against hope as the wedding neared closer that Jon would come riding through the gates of Winterfell. He’d beg her forgiveness, he’d tell her loved her. He would say yes, I will be your King. She does not know when she stopped wanting that reality. It’s not only acceptance Sansa feels as she looks upon her husband now, as contrary and cross as he often makes her. It’s gratitude. 

“Did you fuck him?” Tormund asks quietly. “During his visit, these days past. Did you fuck him?”

“No,” she says. “I told you. I would not do that to you.”

 

 

 

 

“I see I have been replaced as your primary counsel.”

Sansa looks up at Lady Dustin in mild surprise. “What? Who else would fill the role?”

“Your husband, of course.”

“What?” Sansa says again.

“You trust him.”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

Lady Dustin arches an eyebrow. “Fine. You don’t trust anyone.”

 

 

 

 

She knows the shape of him in the dark. 

Sansa in bed with him, the hour late. He is on his side, turned away from her. Asleep. Sansa rolls towards him and she ghosts her fingers down the line of his back. His shoulder. She rests her hand on him and simply touches him, feels his warmth, the roughness of his skin. There is a deep scarred-over gouge beside the raised ridge of his shoulder blade. A coward’s wound; she wants to know who would have dared try to stab him in the back. She knows he would tell her if she asked, so she doesn’t. She rests her palm over it like she can heal it.

She had always thought the best way to learn a person was with your eyes wide open. That you had to notice everything for them to be known. To know was to interrogate, to leave no stone unturned. In the quiet of the night she knows him best like this. She wonders if he feels similarly. If he thinks he knows her. Because he does; she knows that now, too. He knows her.

Tormund’s breathing changes and though he is awake, he does not move. He lets her touch him. She curls her body towards him. She presses her forehead to his back and she breathes in deeply. He’s so warm.

It is dangerous to rely on someone. Anyone. Everyone leaves. In the end, you’re left with no one but yourself. She knows the lesson as sharp and true as anything else this life has brutally tried to teach her. They will leave you. They will be taken. They will betray you.

Still, she winds her arm tightly around him tightly. She feels his body inhale, exhale. He does not speak. His silence is often louder than anything he might say to her. His hand covers hers and he rubs his thumb over her knuckles. He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses the palm of her hand.

 

 

 

 

As preparations are mounted for Tyrion’s visit, Sansa spends long hours with her small council. Strategy sessions absorb most of her time, contingency plans, consideration of any and all possible outcomes of his visit. 

“He’ll want you to rescind your support for Dorne and the Iron Islands,” Lady Dustin says. 

“Of course he will.”

“You can’t, Your Grace. You must stand firm.”

“You think I do not know this?”

She sleeps little as Tyrion and her uncle come ever closer to Winterfell, each day treated as a condemned man eyes an escape from the noose. She holes up in her solar most nights, maps and documents all spread out over the large table in there. 

The night before Tyrion is expected to arrive Tormund comes to her. He steps over to her, remaining behind her instead of by her side, watching her.

“So this is what it takes to build a kingdom, huh? Paper.”

“And gold.” She does not turn around to look at him. She traces her finger over the line at the top of the map where the Wall stretches. She walks her fingers down to the southernmost point of the North. Her finger trips over the border into Bran’s territory. 

Tormund sidles up behind her and rests his hands on her waist. “You have been working hard,” he says. “It does nothing for your worries.” His hands grip her tighter. “What you need is to be fucked, and fucked well,” he says.

Sansa bites down on any way her mouth might twist, smile or or even laugh. She knows he is teasing her. Still, she tips her head back against his shoulder. Her hand drops away from the map.

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

A quiet grunt of surprise form him—she knows what he expects from her, that her desire must be pulled from her as carefully as prying a wolf’s mouth open—and it pleases her to think she too can be unpredictable. She wasn’t lying; she likes what his body can do to hers. How he can push her past the point of thought, how he simplifies everything for her down to the places on herself where he touches her, lit up bright with a pleasure so stupid it leaves her wordless. 

His hands squeezes her waist, and then he bends her over the table. Over the maps, the potential future she has worked so hard to build. 

She closes her eyes when he fits a hand between her legs. Her groan is one of relief rather than anguish. 

“Thank you,” she says, after, shaky and sore. She has come to relish that soreness. Sometimes, just thinking about it is enough to make her clench wet and empty between her legs. She rights herself as she stands on trembling legs.

Tormund snorts, tying the laces on his trousers. “So polite, even after I fucked you wide open.”

She ignores him. “You will behave yourself, when the delegation arrives.” It is as close to a command as she has offered him since they wed.

“You grant me no other choice,” he mocks. He stretches, yawns. “Come to bed with me. Tomorrow will be here soon enough and it will all be fine.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.” He shrugs. “But I do know you.”

 

 

 

 

As Father and Mother used to greet the visiting lords who made the trek up to Winterfell, they wait to meet Tyrion in the yard.. She tries to picture what they look like, her and Tormund, what they will look like to Tyrion upon his arrival. They stand solid beside each other, wrapped in furs. The snow has stopped falling and a quiet gray blankets the grounds.

And then there is no room left for speculation: he is here.

Tyrion bows deeply to Sansa. “Your Grace,” he says. She nods. 

He stands up and he stands before Tormund. He does not appear to know what to do with himself. Tormund stares down at him, impenetrable and intimidating, offering him nothing. “Oh, yes. Your Grace,” and Tyrion sketches a nervous bow. Tormund does not so much as smile as curl his lip. Sansa cuts her eyes to him sharply but he does not look at her. His eyes finally crinkle in amusement.

“I’m only fucking with you. Get up.”

 

 

 

 

After Tyrion and his retinue have settled in their quarters, he asks to speak with Sansa in the godswood. She agrees. 

“I can scarce believe the rumors are true after all,” he says to her once they are alone. “You and a Wildling King.”

“They can hardly be rumors when it was I who had a raven sent to King’s Landing to announce the union.” She looks down at her hands, chapped from the constant cold. “I’m sure Bran knew before the raven left the tower.”

Tyrion says nothing at first. “This marriage cannot be what you wanted,” he finally says. She had not expected that.

“Do you consider yourself an expert? On marriages I have no wish to enter?”

“Firsthand experience, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“You do not need to be his wife and he need not be your King.”

Sansa arches a brow. “We are traditional here in the North. Marriages are only dissolved on pain of death, one party or the other.”

“Or lack of consummation. Excuse me for saying so, but there has been no issue, Your Grace. No child born of this union. If your marriage has not been consummated, it can be absolved. A more suitable match can be made.”

“If my marriage has not been consummated,” she says slowly. The urge to laugh is bright and ungovernable. Apparently the rumors of her marriage bed have not extended beyond Winterfell. She wonders again what Tyrion sees when he looks at her, when he looks at Tormund. What he sees when he sees them together. Surely for such a clever man his imagination cannot fail him that much. Or, no, she thinks. It is not a failure of imagination. There has been no child. He would have her lie and Bran’s court would back the falsehood. She wants to laugh when she thinks of the gallery of maids and guards who have overhead precisely the opposite. “And out of curiosity, who is it you would bring me to marry instead?”

“Quentyn Martell.”

Of course. She wants to tell him she rejected the prospect of such a marriage three times already. “I am not a brood mare, Tyrion,” she says instead. She sighs. “And you cannot quash a Dornish rebellion through marriage to me. You surely cannot believe that.”

“I believe I can keep the kingdom whole.”

“I have already acknowledged Dorne’s right to independence.”

“I was hopeful that might be another act of yours we could absolve.”

“Yes, but like my marriage to the King in the North, commitments have been made.” And with that single statement, she has sealed their future. She will not back down. She will not break the alliances she has built and she will not side with Bran. Change will come, it is inevitable now, whether either of them like it. 

“Commitments?” Tyrion says.

She stands. He does, too. “I speak too polite. Consummations, if you prefer.”

 

 

 

 

“What did the half-man want?”

“He wishes to saddle me with a sixth husband.”

“This man comes here and he insults me this way? This fucker thinks he can kill me?”

“He did not think I had consummated my marriage with you, and as such, could have my marriage annulled.”

Tormund’s eyebrows climb that much higher up his forehead. “This man thinks I cannot fuck you?”

“More like I would not let you.”

“And why would he think that?”

“His own history as my husband, perhaps.” She shrugs. “Or I imagine he heard the same of me as you before we wed.”

A devilish grin cracks his face. He approaches her. “What? That your cunt is made of ice?” She says nothing. “I could tell him what I know now. That you’re always dripping for me. Perhaps I melted you.”

“I am sure it is filth such as this that allows him to believe I would never lie with you.”

“No?” His hand drags up the length of her leg under her skirt. “The Little Hand should show me more respect. Look at you—wet already.”

“Shut up,” she says, baring her teeth, every bit the wolf he calls her. “Or I might just leave you for Dorne after all.”

“You would not dare.” 

Sansa rests a hand on his chest. “He came all this way to offer one last chance to stand with rather than against Bran.” He stops touching her and her body bows towards him.

“You do not need to tell me what that means,” he says. “We will be ready.”

 

 

 

 

That night, before the feast, Sansa goes to meet Tormund so they may enter the Great Hall together. She finds him wearing the crown she had given him. Discomfited and annoyed, it looks entirely wrong on him. 

“Take that off,” she hisses at him.

“You gave me the fucking thing,” he says.

“I changed my mind,” she says, aiming for the lofty tones of a queen while landing somewhere far afield. “You don’t have to wear it,” she says, gentler.

“I do. I want that little cunt to look upon me and know the strength of the King he wishes to replace with his teeny Southron lord.”

“He’s a prince.”

“Fuck him all the same.”

Sansa reaches and she takes the crown from his head. “You’d lose face with your people if you wear this. I see that now.” She smoothes back his hair and then draws her hand away. There is more she wishes to say. That she understands it now, or at least she thinks she does. How much he gave up to serve not only his people and the promise of their future, but to help her when she needed it most. To show that sort of weakness is only fatal. She knows that, too. The same as rolling over and showing a thing with teeth your waiting belly. She squeezes her fingers around the wrought metal until it bites into her skin. She gives it a decisive shake. “You hate this. And now I hate you in it.” She hands the crown off to one of her ladies.

She rests her hand lightly on his arm before they enter the Hall. “Tyrion already knows the measure of you,” she says beneath her breath. Lightly, as if the fate of the continent has not begun to tip perilously out of balance. “I don’t expect his visit to last long.”

 

 

 

 

She wakes and she is cold. Tormund is at the window again. Tyrion did not stay much past the night of the feast, long enough to ensure his horses and his men were well-rested enough to begin the journey back South. 

“Winter will be over soon,” Tormund says. 

“Hmm?” 

“I can taste it.” She buries herself down into the bed, desperate for warmth. “You should come with me sometime. Beyond the Wall,” he says after a long moment. 

Sansa closes her eyes. The farthest north she has ever been is to Castle Black. Beyond the Wall is an impossible place of legend, even to her now. Even with Jon there and even as those very people who live there belong to her, too. “It would make for a good gesture,” she says sleepily. 

He scoffs and she opens her eyes. He stands there, nude, built like one of those statues of the Warrior. The early morning light glows a pale yellow behind him. He is looking back at her. “I do not mean for politics,” he says. “I mean I would like for you to see it.”

“You miss it terribly?” She remembers how much she had missed Winterfell, as if it was a member of her own family taken from her. She had missed it even as she lived inside of it as Ramsay’s wife. It is an awful thing to miss the place you came from, the place you call home. 

Tormund frowns. “Of course I do,” he says. 

Sansa nods. “In the spring. You can take me.” It’s too cold in their bed chamber. “Will you come back to bed?”

He shuts the window.

 

 

 

 

Lyanna’s fifth name day comes and goes. Sansa has been married to Tormund for half as long.

Lyanna grows. Her eyes are blue and intelligent, her mouth often down-turned and sharply wielded. She has a serious face and she is a serious girl.

One morning, after her name day, she asks Sansa, “Where’s Father?”

Sansa stills, the fork grasped tightly in her hand, her breakfast abandoned. “Father?” 

Lyanna shoves her own breakfast across her plate. She frowns. “He promised me we’d go riding yesterday.”

“Father,” Sansa repeats. She should have seen this coming. She has watched Lyanna with Tormund; he is the closest thing to a father she knows. And Sansa can see it, how he must have raised his own daughters, in the care and the discipline he affords her daughter. She knows that Lyanna will grow to believe she is as capable as any son. Sansa cannot name the pang of emotion she feels in her chest. She turns away from it. 

“Lyanna was looking for you this morning,” she says to Tormund later that night. She is seated at her vanity table, her back to him, just a sliver of his face and his body visible but warped in the glass set before her. 

Behind her, he sighs. “Your Northmen don’t know the first thing about mounting a proper offense. It is taking me time to teach them to fight, like real men.”

There’s an argument to be started here, she knows it, but she will leave it for the small council, for her lords to proclaim hurt outrage at such a charge against their forces. Sansa drags the brush through the ends of her hair. “Lyanna likes you very much,” she says instead.

“I am a likable man.” His voice is teasingly boastful but when she lifts her eyes to the mirror she can see he is watching her carefully. He does that often—portrays himself as beyond care, outsized and humorous, but beneath that he carries himself as a warrior prepared for battle, canny of any traps. There is a caution to him that she supposes all possess when they know what it means to fight.

“I still have yet to meet your own daughters. You think they would not care for me?”

“I think they would not understand you.” Sansa turns to face him. She finds his features drawn in soft assessment. “They are closer to your age than to Lyanna’s, and they have spent all those years Beyond the Wall. They are brave girls, and clever girls, but like most of my people they do not understand the world you build here.”

“Do you understand the world we build here?”

“I try to.” Her face flickers like the candles lit along the mantel at his blunt honesty. Sometimes she thinks to herself, private and fleeting, that she would be lost without it. She pushes the same thought away now.

Sansa traces the silvered edge of the brush before she places it down on the vanity. “Lyanna has nothing of me in her. It is as if she is a little stranger.” She has never lent voice to this concern before; it is both entirely too revealing and freeing. 

Tormund frowns. “How is that?”

“She is so impulsive, so physical. And brave.” Sometimes Sansa can see Arya as a child when she looks at Lyanna. It hurts and it aches and the loss clings to her too tight, suffocating. She will not tell him this much. She cannot. “She has no fear in her. I can’t imagine that. She is not afraid of anything.”

“And you see none of you in that?” He is deadly serious now.

“I am afraid constantly. I have lived my entire life in a state of fear. Of what can be taken from me. What can be done to me. Believe me, a crown has done little to help.”

“And yet,” he says.

“And yet what?”

“You do not stop. You have not fled. You put your little crown on and you go before your people. You defend what is yours. Fear has not stopped you.”

It will, eventually. Every person, every single person, even a Queen, has her breaking point. “I get very tired.” Emotion has crept into her voice and she wishes to take it back.

Tormund does not falter. “Alright. I will hold you up.”

 

 

 

 

The thaw has only begun to set in when Sansa receives it—a summons to King’s Landing. Her brother, the King, Bran the Broken, requests an audience with her. 

Her small council is cleanly split, half in an uproar against it and the other half strident that she must go. For Sansa, there was never any debate. She would not back down. She would go. Her travel plans are assembled quickly. Lady Dustin will accompany her, in addition to a retinue of Northmen and Free Folk. She has Inga select the Free Folk to join them on the journey South, insistent that Inga herself join them as well. As the days pass rapidly, as the date of her departure nears ever closer, Sansa finds she feels more than slightly untethered. It is as if she is a passenger in a runaway carriage and the road they race down is unfamiliar and treacherous.

“Do you wish me go in your stead?” Tormund asks her, but only in the privacy of their bed chamber. They still treat each other with a distant formality in public, including in the small council meetings. He follows her cues, and she knows, were she to throw herself at him, show any small bit of affection towards him, he would reciprocate threefold. He is always taking what little she gives him and showing her how much more he can be capable of. “I have never been. I can see what all the fucking fuss is about.”

“No.” Her answer is immediate and sharp. 

Curiosity shifts over his face. “I could go with you then.”

“I said no.” There are a hundred different reasons she could give him for why he must stay, but she cannot give voice to the one that immediately fills her mouth. “You’d melt,” she says wryly instead, trying to downplay the vehemence of her initial reply. 

And then she is out of time. She wakes in the middle of the night before she is to leave. The fire has burnt down to embers behind the grate. She lets it most nights; sleeping beside Tormund is like sleeping next to a barely banked flame. Her body is damp with sweat where it was pressed against him.

Sansa moves to get up but makes it no further than the edge of the bed. She sits there, curled in on herself, her back bare to her sleeping husband and the furs clutched tight to her chest. She watches the fire die. She thinks of the waiting morning, of the long journey South. She thinks of Bran, how there is not a single thing she could keep secret from him even if she tried. She does not know what to expect of the visit, of her brother. She does not know how to chart the future that is to come.

She hears as much as feels rustling behind her. Tormund drags his hand down the length of her spine. She shivers. He mouths at the center of her back. 

“You cannot sleep?” he says. She shakes her head. He winds his arm around to hold her by the waist, anchoring her. His mouth drifts higher, hot and open. “My offer still stands—I could go with you.” His voice is low, a tired rumble.

Sansa reaches her hand back and grabs at his thigh. She squeezes even as the hard muscle does not yield. “No,” she says.

His mouth brushes over the bend of her shoulder, then the nape of her neck. “My lone wolf,” he says, not without a bit of pride. “Come here. Come back to bed.”

She lets him drag her back with him. She curls onto her side, her head tucked under his chin, his own body likewise curled towards hers. 

“I’m frightened,” she says into his neck.

“Fear is good. You fight better, sharper, with fear.” He holds her closer though, and his hand catches in her hair. “He is your brother,” he says, quieter now. “He would not harm you.”

“I no longer know him. You know how he has let his own council move against me.”

Tormund grunts in the back of his throat. His fingers are soothing in her hair. The temptation pries at the corner of her mind. She could stay, too. She could never leave—not just Winterfell, but this moment. 

“What if they take back the North? What if I can’t hold it?” she whispers.

Tormund tips his head back to look down into her face. He cradles her face in his hands. “Then we will kill each Southron fool who tries to step foot on our fucking land.”

“And what if they kill me?”

A dark and sorrowful look passes over his face. No surprise to it; he has thought of this, too. “Then I will ride South. I will kill each man I find. I will burn all of Westeros to the ground. They will not take what is ours.” He smoothes his hand over her cheek. “You tell those cunts in King’s Landing. You tell your little brother that.”

Sansa fixes her eyes on his face. The dim light from the dwindling fire limns his face in shadow. She raises her hand to his throat. She can feel his pulse, solid and steady. Fragile. A reminder: she is not alone. 

“You are stronger than the South knows. You are brave. Show them that.” She closes her eyes. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” she says. And then, with the same reverence the more devout would apply to prayer, she says his name.

 

 

 

 

King’s Landing is much as she remembers it: crowded and dirty and loud. Winter is but a shared dream here in the South; damp heat bakes the crowded streets and Sansa sweats beneath her cloak. 

The Red Keep, however, is nothing as she recalls. There is peace here, order, and none of the abject fear that marked Joffrey’s rule. The dread, she thinks, is solely her own. Each foul memory floats easily to the surface as she walks the same halls her younger self once did. Her smaller self. She has grown, she tells herself. She enters now not as a pawn, but as an equal. She will not settle for anything less.

She is seen into Bran’s solar. He is waiting for her, and he greets her as a sister and a Queen—the latter before the former. 

Sansa now sits across from him. He holds himself similar to the last time she saw him, an unnatural rigidness to the carriage of his body, seated as it is, his head tipped back and chin raised. She would not know how to read him even if she dared try.

“I am told I cannot be King of only pieces of the map,” Bran says. His voice is as flat as his eyes. “I diminish myself before I begin. I am inclined to agree.”

Courage, she tells herself. “The Iron Islands and Dorne deserve their independence.”

“As much as the North does?”

“Bran, you are my brother. So I will be frank.” Not only that, but she is certain courtly demeanor would be all but wasted on him as he is now. He is that much further gone since she saw him last. Less a man and more of something she lacks the knowledge and experience to name. She cannot quiet the voice in the back of her mind that says placing a crown on his head was a terrible decision. That this is what he wanted. “When given the option of the North’s independence and anything else, I will always choose the former.”

“You will choose violence?” He says the words as if they are someone else’s and he is all too curious to place them in her mouth.

“Please do not make me.”

Bran’s eyes are bottomless as he looks at her. No, she does not know him any longer. There is no telling what he might do—what anyone would do to consolidate power. What she has done. “We are not there yet, sister. Neither of us must decide at present. We have other pressing concerns.” What he does with his mouth she wants to call a smile. “I wish to congratulate you,” he continues, “on your next child.” Sansa goes very still. She resists the urge to place her hand over her stomach. She learned of the conception only days ago, their journey finally near its end. She was sick, miserable, each morning, and deep down, she knew. After all that time, and so far from home. Lady Dustin knew too; “Isn’t that the way of it?” she said. “You get what you want but only at the worst of times.”

“I thank you,” she says stiffly.

“I am happy for you, sister. Tormund has proven an able match for you. I am pleased he loves you so.”

“Please stop,” Sansa says. It is wrong to hear it from Bran, something they have not even confessed to each other. It is wrong, that he knows more than anyone else has any right to of their marriage.

She wants to know if he knows everything. If he can see when she left Winterfell. Tormund had gripped her body tight and close to his. She felt the brush of his lips at first her temple and then her ear, her cheek. He pulled back from her and looked down into her face.

“You will return,” he said. He did not say, _farewell_. “The North is our home.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is ours.” 

No one else is meant to know that. It is theirs. “My wolf,” Tormund had whispered in her ear.

“I am pleased you love him, too,” Bran says now.

“I said stop.”

“A second child will be good for you.” Bran pauses, and Sansa waits, primed with dread. “The curious element of history is how it repeats, in its own way. A child raised in Winterfell, unaware of its true parentage, same as her father. A queen who presents her child falsely as heir.”

She has the hysterical urge to laugh. Of course he knows Lyanna is Jon’s child. He knows everything. What an awesome and terrifying trait for a king to possess. “Bran,” she says. He has no one here, no one in his court to remind him of who he once was. She wonders if it is too late. “You would threaten your own niece?”

“No. I would merely remind her mother of her weaknesses.”

Anger lashes at her. She curls her hand into a fist beneath the table. Her nails bite into and threaten to break the skin. She must get word, she must send a rider, to Tormund about the baby. In case anything is to happen here—he must know. He would destroy the world, she is certain, for a child of his. For her. And that is what she wants, she realizes. The same as Cersei, the same as Daenerys—if what is hers, be it land, family or love, is taken from her, she will destroy the world. She accepts this truth about herself calmly.

“The wheel will always turn.” Bran lifts his head, more regal now than she ever could have expected of him. “You have my confidence. I will not unmake your story.”

It’s not only him, she knows. His power. Anyone can unmake a story. A life. One stitch cut and the entire garment unravels. 

“No harm will come to you,” he continues. A slow, not-quite grin stretches his mouth. “I would hate for your husband to, what was it? Ride South. Kill each man he finds. Burn my kingdom to the ground. No, I will not take what is yours. You can tell him that this cunt has heard him.” Sansa feels ill. She knows deep down what she has always known: no one will ever be able to move against her brother. King Bran. Bran the Broken. He will know each plot against him. He will know his enemies better than they know themselves. All he’ll ever have to do is close his eyes.

“But, Sansa. There is something far more important for us to discuss. It is why I brought you here.”

The fear stokes up inside of her, tangling with her impotent anger. She can feel it lick through her, all-consuming and unstoppable, the same as her fury. She knows how easy it is for a thing to fall apart. Her father’s head at the Sept of Baelor. Joffrey at his wedding to Margaery. Petyr Baelish delivering her into the arms of her husband, a monster, inside the very walls of Winterfell. Gendry, downed by the men meant to be her allies. Robin’s easy mistakes, his half-burnt letters. It only takes one moment. It takes so very little to end one story and violently start another. It is all too fragile.

“Queen Daenerys is alive,” her brother says. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know! A cliffhanger ending!
> 
> In a perfect world, one where I have unlimited time and boundless energy, this is the first fic in a series of three. The next fic would be from Arya's point of view, returned to a Westeros that's essentially a powder keg just waiting to go off after ten years of absence, and the third and final fic would be from Meera Reed's point of view. Both are in the "scribbles on post-it notes and kinda sorta messily outlined" stage of writing, and considering this fic alone took the entire summer to write, we'll see when these get written.
> 
> I want to thank everyone who read this and enjoyed it! This really was a fun fic to write, and I played the ultimate prank on myself by making myself now rabidly ship Sansa and Tormund, lol, so there's that, too! THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING ALONG FOR THE RIDE!
> 
> Feel free to come join me on tumblr: @widespindriftgaze


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